And, duh, the answer to last week's Puzzler.

Well, yesterday morning I listened to CarTalk and thus learned the answer to the baseball puzzler that was vexing me the other day. It turns out that I was somewhat on the right track, but I overthought things a bit. The puzzle question, basically is this:

A guy goes into a bar and notes that a baseball game is on TV. He asks the bartender what the game's status is, and the bartender says, "Bottom of the fifth, no score, nobody on, two outs." Then the batter hits a grounder sharply down the first-base line, which the first-baseman cleanly fields - - and then hurls across the field to third base. The third-baseman catches the relay, steps on the bag, the ump signals "Out!", and the inning ends. How is this possible?

Well, the answer (look away, if you're still working it out) is that the guy was not watching the game directly on the TV, but rather in the mirror behind the bar. So it's backwards. Oy.

My own answer, though, was clearly overthought. I assumed that he wasn't watching any game at all, but rather the movie The Pride of the Yankees, in which Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig. A bit of lore about that film is that Gehrig, in real life, hit lefty, but Cooper simply couldn't hit lefty without looking horrible. So the filmmakers made him a reverse-image New York Yankees uniform, and in the baseball scenes, shot everything "reversed" so that all they had to do was flip the film-image to make it look right. (Yeah, that's a pretty foggy explanation.) So anyway, I was on the right track with the backwards image, but I did a bit too much thinking. Oh well.