A couple days ago, we here at NotGraphs utilized our powerful power to facilitate a crowdsourcing effort of great relevance to our “human” “condition” — namely, to determine whether, in fact, the image above represents the perfect golf swing.

A total of 104 votes were cast — many of them by living people — with a distribution very similar to this one:

No.	54	42.19%	
Yes.	25	19.53%	
Other:	25	19.53%

The general feeling is that, in fact, we are not seeing the perfect golf swing in the embedded image.

Of note are some of the answers provided in the Other column, as follow.

This is a man who’s been exposed to Gamma Radiation. Don’t make him angry.
Sound advice.

Yes, if you happen to dwell in the world of Tron.
Some cursory research validates this claim.

Inverted stapler. Tommy John candidate.
Science-y!

Polls are a cheap way to drive traffic to a webiste.
By his own admission, this answer was submitted by reader glassSheets.

glassSheets’ mom is a cheap way to drive traffic.
“Snap” is the word for which you are busily searching.

African or European?
A troubling question for these troubled times.

It’s time for another installment of “Shorter Baseball Columnists,” in which we read mainstream baseball columnists and marginalized bloggers like Murray Chass so you don’t have to! Let us begin!

Shorter Fay Vincent: I noticed an awkwardly worded sentence in the Times. Sportswriting is dead.

Shorter Dan Shaughnessy: A very wealthy guy showed up at a Sox game.

Shorter T.J. Simers: Don Mattingly and James Loney have a positive outlook on things. I don’t like that at all.

Shorter Kevin Kernan: Regarding the Yankees, it’s quite possibly time to start panicking.

Shorter Jim Souhan: It’s too bad the Twins have money.

Shorter Murray Chass: I like bunts.

The “Shorter” approach to Internetty commentary traces back, as best as one can tell, to Daniel Davies.

Click on the above image, and view it in all its embiggened glory. That’s the least you can do for that lady; she deserves it.

If that’s her reaction to Dan Uggla extending his hit streak to 30 games, and it was, imagine how she might celebrate, should Uggla get there, a 40-game hit streak. Or 50-game hit streak.

I don’t even want to think about 56. I worry. I can’t help it.

Photo credit: The Associated Press, via daylife.

We receive quite a bit of mail here at NotGraphs’ headquarters, much of it inappropriate either in a sexual way or spiritual way or other type of way.

That said, we occasionally receive correspondence of some merit, too. Below are three recent examples of same, with responses of varying quality.

(Note: got a pressing question or incisive comment for NotGraphs? Feel free to fire it through the internet to not+tips@fangraphs.com!)

Now, on to the letters:

Is it okay to bring a baseball mitt to a game? My friend says it’s not something for adult men to be doing, but I don’t really see the ish.

— Shawn in Shawnee

If it makes you feel better, Tony, I wear my mitt all the time and everywhere — at home, at a restaurant, and, yes, at a baseball game. I just never wear it on my hand, if you know what I mean.

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I tend not to worry about the fate of the United States of America. Through two bungled wars in the Middle East, Hurricane Katrina, a mortgage and financial crisis, the debt ceiling fiasco, the most partisan of partisan politics, and today’s threats of another recession, I’ve never doubted the American spirit. When faced with adversity, America endures. I’ve always believed that.

Until yesterday, when I watched video of two grown men tussle for a foul ball that landed in a trash bin at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. There was nothing exceptional about those two Americans, and their despicable actions forced me to ask a most difficult question: Where did America go wrong?

After much deep introspection, I know that America hasn’t gone wrong. It might be on the brink, but I still have hope for you, our southern neighbors. Because those two clowns at The Trop don’t represent America. Not the one I know, and have experienced. I still believe in America.

The foul ball episode in Florida reminded me of one I had at the ballpark about a week and a half ago. I was at the Rogers Centre SkyDome with two of my mates, the Texas Rangers in town, on a brilliant summer evening. We were seated in section 116, first base side, row 37, only three rows from the section’s entrance. The game began, and immediately we knew: We were in foul ball territory. A couple of screamers landed to our right, and our left, and I told the boys to stay alert. I had a feeling we’d get a turn, that there’d be action.

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NotGraphs readers who are also fans of science (or charlatans who pretend to be fans of science but have just seen that one episode of the Fox program House) are likely familiar with the heuristic known as Occam’s Razor. If you are unfamiliar with Occam’s Razor, it essentially states that when presented with two or more competing hypotheses, we should tend to the one that requires making the fewest new assumptions.

But I am not here today to talk about Occam’s Razor. I am here to introduce to you an exciting new heuristic that can help us better understand and even predict human behavior. Well, the behavior of one human.

It is called Bud’s Razor and I have defined it as such:

Given any issue on which he must make a decision, the wrongest decision is the one Bud Selig is most likely to make.

While this has been in the testing phase for the better part of a decade, the recent three game suspension handed down to Shane Victorino and only Shane Victorino for a brawl that saw Ramon Ramirez peg him with a pitch and charge the plate and saw Eli Whiteside (feebly attempt to) tackle Placido Polanco — which I accurately predicted using Bud’s Razor — has confirmed its usefulness.

Not quite convinced? Let us look at some test cases.

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I was but a young lad when Hall of Famer Jim Palmer began doing print ads for Jockey underwear — ads that presented Palmer to the world as the thinking man’s beefcake. Survey them, and you’ll find in his gaze not the slightest hint of embarrassment. He’s not exactly reveling in the moment, but he exudes the sense that there’s nothing at all untoward about going through one’s day clothed in nothing more than decorative grippers. As it turns out, he was right.

I would like to think that what follows is the exemplar of the genre. Please quaff deeply …

His pallor is a bit on the “nuclear fallout” side — a nod, I am quite sure, to the mounting Cold War tensions of the day. The place he went to tan, no doubt, had “parlor” in its name. He is lifting weights but not heavy weights. After all, one must remain lithe and pliable if one is going to make love to America. One must also remain quick and agile in case America’s husband comes home at the wrong hour.

The chest hair is ample enough to suggest the thumping masculinity just beneath, but it is sparse enough not to suggest a lower-evolved sort. Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull or Riunite on ice? Jim Palmer serves the latter. The body wave atop him? Thank you, Wella Balsam shampoo and asbestos-lined styling dryer with attachments.

And what’s he looking at? Perhaps a second paramour has arrived. “What are you doing here?” Jim Palmer asks. “As long as you’re here, please join us. Would you like some Riunite?”

The massage oils are imported. Sometimes, he warms them in a fondue pot.

So you put it on the hogs or in the hogs?

It may sound like hogwash is meant to clean hogs, particularly right after castration. Most likely, though, the term was coined to describe a pig swill that was intended to feed our porcine friends. In the same way, we might get all up in arms about the hogwash in our national pastime, and yet we eat it up. This week in Google Baseball, we’ll tackle the dual meanings of this old-school word.

The true nature of the nuance in this word is not about feeding an appetite, though. It’s more about the cleanliness or legitimacy of the thing being described. Hogwash is ridiculous — because the word sounds laughable — and anything is therefore rendered silly by being paired with the adjective. Even when John Thorn says something serious about steroids, the use of the word brings a hint of a smile with it.

“This whole thing about McGwire simply permits sportswriters to imagine themselves to be Woodward and Bernstein, people who see themselves as guardians of a sacred portal, the last best hope for truth and justice – and it’s all hogwash and baloney.” – John Thorn, baseball historian

What do we find when we play Google Baseball with the word? We find the unwritten rules of baseball. Ridiculous! We find spray charts. Ludicrous! The derby jinx. Debunked! Weekly highlights of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. Clever! Dirk Nowitzki as a pitcher? Clearly farcical. Most of these examples use the word to emphasize the absurdity of a thing.

Instead, how about Team Hogwash, a slow-pitch softball team giving up about 13 runs a game on average? Or an oyster topping called “Hog Wash” from Hog Island? Clearly these two entries into this week’s edition of Google Baseball are a step above. They show a sense of pride in the word, an enjoyment of the zany. They own it.

Clearly we’ve learned one thing from today’s game. If that thing wasn’t the true nature of the word, it was the best way to find nourishment from hogwash.

Embrace the hogwash.

While Keith Comstock’s major-league career is a bit on the undistinguished side, his Las Vegas Stars card — which is absolutely your Daguerreotype of the Evening — is a many-splendored thing. First comes the power, and then comes the glory …

While I suspect that the baseball-to-the-rascal-basket situation — a situation known in some circles as “the nobleman’s pickle” — is a staged pratfall, there’s still much to appreciate about this work of high, higher and highest art. Even so, the romantic in me wants to believe that Mr. Comstock legitimately took one to the pills courtesy of an offstage teammate given to madcappery in all its forms!

For a moment — just a moment — I forgot that all of us will die.

(Well-meaning groin shot: A gentleman named Steve)

Faithful NotGraphs reader P. Agnello brought this little dandy to our attention:

Why yes, that would be real Americans digging through real trash for a real foul ball and then getting into a real fight for said Trash Ball.

After the frenzied waste-search led to a frenzied trash fight, ballpark security had to intervene. According the intrepid Todd Kalas: “Bad behavior; nobody gets the prize.”

Leave it to TK to use a semicolon in speech. Well, nonetheless, that real foul ball became real trash in a slightly askew retelling of Solomon’s Judgement, a retelling in which neither mother relents and the baseball ends up in Sheol.

Oddly enough, this may not be the most epic dumpster dive in baseball history.
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