Oh no:

Topper swinging at shit out of the zone? Now we know why the Phillies couldn’t hit in Games 6 and 7 of the NLCS. It starts at the top!

We’d like to give Rob Thomson the benefit of the doubt here, so we’re looking for any narratives we can spin to lessen the blow.

Personally, this looks like a check swing to me. I wouldn’t even say he missed the bell. I think he held up just in time, as you can see by my mathematical rendering here:

Now if you notice, I did E=MC2, divided by 90 + 6. That gives us a bat angle of 89 degrees, so therefore he did NOT go around. Using this simple math, we can safely say that Topper smartly executed a check swing. He was battling up there, seeing the bell and only swinging at appropriate times. This was a good plate appearance.

In a related note, I took one week of Calculus at Boyertown Senior High before realizing I didn’t actually need it for college. So I dropped the class to pick up an extra study hall, and played Nintendo 64 in the National Honor Society room, which was supposed to be used for “tutoring” sophomores and juniors. Sometimes it’s about working smarter, and not harder. Or just don’t work at all.