Puzzler of the week

[Scott MacLean]

This week's puzzler:

I had had a hard day at work. The boss had been on my case. I decided to hit the local tavern on my way home.

I walked in to the tavern, and I noticed there was a ballgame on the TV that's hanging on the back wall. I took a stool at the bar, and ordered a beer. I glanced up. I'm not really that interested in baseball, but there was an attractive lady sitting there, and she seemed interested in the game. I asked her, "What's the score?"

She said, "There's no score. It's the bottom of the 5th."

There were two outs. The batter hit a hard grounder, sharply down the first-base line. Since there was no one on base, the first baseman was playing off the bag. He lunged and grabbed the ball before it could make it into the outfield.

Then�instead of running to first base to make the out�he took the ball, and fired it across the diamond to the third baseman, who caught the ball and stepped on third. The ump made the sign saying, "You're out!" All three of his team mates ran off the field.

What happened?

Last week's puzzler:

It was a dark and stormy night. Tommy and I were passengers on a small ferry, en route to a tiny island off the Connecticut coast. We were on the upper deck, smoking Cuban cigars with the captain. This was the kind of ferry that takes cars as well as passengers, and from our vantage we could see the eight or nine cars that were parked on the front of the boat. But we could barely see the license plates of these cars, let alone what makes and models they were.

As we approached the dock, Tommy and I decided that we needed to have a bet. Tommy said, "Geez, how many of these cars do you figure are automatics, and how many do you figure are standard shift?"

So, I picked a number. I said, " I think three cars are stick shift."

And Tommy said, "I think there are five."

The boat finally docked, and the people who owned the cars got in them and drove away. And I turned to my brother, and said, "You won."

We never left the upper deck, and all we could see were the backs of the cars. We couldn't see inside the cars, nor could we identify what makes the cars were. But we did see the people get in and drive the cars off the boat

The captain said, "How could there not be an argument here? How could you possibly know and agree that Tommy's number was right?"

Last week's puzzler answer:

The answer is we didn't determine how many stick shifts there were. We determined how many automatics there were. We did a little subtraction problem here. The way we determined which cars were automatics is that when you start an automatic transmission car, as you shift from park to drive -- you go through reverse - momentarily. So all the cars with automatics had their reverse lights flash for a split second, and then they drove off. We counted how many cars had their lights flash. And then I settled the bet. I lost another hundred bucks