Hey, Ron Gardenhire, your team is losing by 15 runs, a position player is on the mound, and your center fielder and shortstop just let a harmless fly ball drop between them. Is that Twins baseball?

Hey, Ron Gardenhire: Evans contends that Lacan’s earliest versions of the mirror stage, while flawed, can be regarded as a pioneering concept in the field of ethology and a precursor of both cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology. Do you find any validity in this argument?

Huh. Okay. Well, anyway, I might be visiting Minneapolis this fall. Any chance you and I could get some drinks?

Anyone who’s played the backyard variety of base- or wiffle- or even kickball will be acquainted with the idea of the ghost runner. This sort of ghost, second in friendliness only to the very famous one employed by Paramount Pictures, happily replaces us on base, content with moving station-to-station like a phantom Molina brother.

For all the popularity of the ghost runner, however, the ghost swing remains a rare sight, utilized by only the avantest of sporting’s garde. Yet it was just such a swing that Milwaukee pitcher Randy Wolf employed in the top of the third inning of Saturday night’s contest against the San Francisco Giants.

As you see in the footage above, San Francisco’s Ryan Vogelsong begins the at-bat with a four-seam fastball to Wolf — to which Wolf responds by leaving the actual bat on his left shoulder and taking a pretty substantial cut right-handed with his invisible bat. The result? That depends. The baseball that you and I see lands in catcher Chris Stewart’s glove for a strike. The one that Wolf was swinging at appears — if we assume that Wolf follows its path with his eyes — appears to land foul somewhere down the first-base line.

Some will call it madness; others, genius. As you might imagine, both parties are right. For now, it’s our duty merely to appreciate Randy Wolf’s brazen declaration on behalf of the whimsical.

Despite the fact that he enters play Saturday with a line of just .245/.303/.372 (.277 BABIP), it’s entirely likely that — owing to a combination of defense, park adjustment, etc. — it’s entirely likely that Sam Fuld is an average major leaguer. Add to this some notable biographical details — that he went to Stanford, for example, or that he has diabetes and worked for STATS, Inc. and went to Phillips Exeter and is Jewish — and one finds in Sam Fuld the makings of a Nerd Among Men.

Fuld himself problematized that narrative on Friday night, however. In the top of the fifth inning, with Fuld on first, Fuld’s teammate Sean Rodriguez grounded to Royals second baseman Chris Getz. Attempting to start the double play, Getz flipped to shortstop Alcides Escobar, who’d moved over to second to take the throw. What happened after that is what you see in the expertly embedded GIF at the top of this post.

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A number of people in the sabermetric community have questioned the wisdom of the Braves’ decision last summer to send away a young and talented shortstop in Yunel Escobar for an old and less-talented shortstop in Alex “Sea Bass” Gonzalez.

Though we oughtn’t draw unnecessarily strong conclusions from one isolated incident, the footage you see thoroughly GIF’d and embedded above might, at the very least, point to some issues within the brain part of the Blue Jay shortstop.

Specifically what you’re seeing is an incident from last Thursday’s Pittsburgh-Toronto game in which Escobar mimicked a throw to first but then — kinda blatantly, really — opted to go ahead and punch former teammate Matt Diaz, instead.

As this YouTube footage shows, it’s likely that Escobar was exacting some sort of revenge for a takeout-type slide executed by Diaz the night before; however, there appears to be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about Diaz’s actions.

Friendly punch throw to Alex Remington for heads-up on this.

Remember VCRs? Of course you do. So does our favorite umpire, Joe West.

You’ll be happy to know that the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has confirmed, with help from our resident Photoshopper Ross (@syourh), that The Great Ejector has no time for Netflix; that his VCR is still going strong. Because, as Joe West said so himself, or would if I could ask him about VCRs, there are far too few things in life with an “EJECT” button on them.

Thanks, Ross. Keep up the great work around here.

Observe the following Hot GIF of Wily Mo Pena, courtesy of Drew Fairservice and Bill Baer:

Now, NotGraphs readers! Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

It is obvious to me that when this forearm bash occurred, the world exploded. I am asking for some brave soul to somehow reflect that in this hot GIF action, turning it into exploding GIF action. Alas, despite my great talents, I do not have the know-how (nor the technology, I think) required to put an explosion into this GIF when Wily Mo Pena’s forearm makes contact with Gerardo Parra’s. But maybe, just maybe, one of you can.

If anyone has ever said of Carson Cistulli “That guy’s impossible to push around,” then that anyone is wrong. No fewer than all/two of our faithful readers have demanded Hot GIF action of Cirque du Soleil’s Gabryel Nogueira da Silva throwing out the first pitch at PETCO Park before Monday’s Royals-Padres game — a.k.a. a critical mass (of readers, that is). The GIF you’ll find after the jump, then, comes to your computer screen courtesy of electronic bullying.

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I wasn’t able to see the game in its entirety, but Padre broadcasters Tony Gwynn and Mark Neely noted during Sunday’s contest between Atlanta and San Diego that Tim Hudson was using his slider with some frequency against left-handed batters. Indeed, per the Pitch F/x data, 21 of the 104 pitches (20.2%) Hudson threw were sliders — slightly above his season average of 14.6%. Another eight pitches (7.7%) were classified as cutters — itself a significant figure because (a) sliders and cutters have similar movement/velocity and (b) only 3.0% of Hudson’s pitches this season have been classified as cutters.

Whether sliders, cutters, or their depraved issue, the slutter, the pitches that Hudson threw Padre rookie Anthony Rizzo at 1-1 and 3-2, respectively, during Rizzo’s sixth inning at-bat, were very clearly of the totally unfair variety.

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Edwin Encarnacion hit his third home run of the season, a solo shot, Saturday night in St. Louis, leaving him only 37 shy of the 40 long balls¹ the Toronto Blue Jays brass told us he had the potential to hit.

Octavio Dotel, as you can see, called the round-tripper. Why else would he, in a 6-2 game, be so super stoked about it?

The next time you catch a ball at the ballpark, home run or foul ball, whether you predicted it or not, I trust that you’ll channel your inner Octavio, and do the Dotel as if no one were watching.

1. A hunch: Edwin’s probably not going to get there.

Much love, respect and adulation to @James_In_TO for posting the GIF (pronounced: “Jif”) in a tweet.

Given that Scott Baker is conceding only about 2.5 walks per nine innings and sits among the league’s top-10 in Zone%, you’d think that a batter like Corey Hart, having only walked in 6.8% of his career plate appearances, would be surprised to draw a base on balls from Baker.

Decidedly to the contrary, we have this footage from Friday night’s Twins-Brewers game. So unmoved is Hart by Baker’s second-inning walk that he (i.e. Hart) decides to utilize the ubercasual behind-the-back bat toss after the decisive fourth ball.

It’s hard to see, but you can actually see Hart utter the words “Ho” and “Hum” as he makes his way down to first.