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The bases were loaded, but all runners were standing off their
respective bases. By throwing the ball to the third baseman, the runner from
second to third was forced OUT. Since that was the third out of the inning, the
batter, along with his three teammates who had been on the three bases, ran off
the field.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 9:23
AM
Subject: Puzzler of the week
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
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