Nothing like the first few days of spring training.

I mean, everyone knows that true baseball fans revel in the fact that there's no clock in our national pastime ... that the game is not bound to a dreary watch ... that, like the foul lines, baseball goes on infinitely. Okay, so I'm no Roger Angell, and to be honest with you, watching guys long-toss and stretch with surgical tubing is pretty damned boring. But hey, it's 80 and sunny here in Stuart, Fla.

And I did see something I'd never seen before in baseball today.

Jason Johnson, a 27-year-old righthander for the Orioles, decided that to exorcise the demons from his rookie season (1-10, 7.02 ERA), he had to cleanse his arm of all evil -- so he shaved the hair off it. Actually, he shaved both of his arms and bleached his hair blond.

"Scott Erickson saw what I'd done and said, 'I like that, out with the old,' " Johnson said. "I just want to throw everything from last year away and make a fresh start."

To paraphrase Bull Durham's Crash Davis: if he goes out and wins, people will call him colorful. But if he's still the same pitcher, they'll just say, "Johnson's got no hair on his...arms."