![]() ![]() I suppose one excuse for my long solving time was my many write-overs: Speaking of which, as of Friday, I have just six months more to go before I RETIRE. Really nice to see some other baseball terms sneak in, too, such as HOME STANDS (ugh!), LETS IN, MAJORS, MET(s), NAB, TEAM O (crossing ORIOLES), RAN INTO, and RETIRE. I wasn’t COWed, but wOWed, and I think I even uttered that word. ![]() ![]() The circled “i”s helped a lot, but it was only until I got to DETRO IT, and asked myself, “Hey, what gives? All the other across theme answers are names of TEAMs!” and then saw the city names, and filled in TIGERS crossing that same “I”. I know that it should have been easy, especially for baseball aficionados, but it took me almost 2 hours, and then I DNF (had “FoR” instead of “FER”). ‘mericans (whose given name can be found in the puzzle) is in Toronto this weekend, visiting son (who’s also up there for the weekend from NYC), so I completed this crossword by myself. Thanks, David Kahn, for a nice Sunday puzzle. Not a ton of fun cluing but I found the following entertaining: Not eating PAINT chips, DRAWL being a Sound of the South, VAN being a mover but we hope not a shaker, "heavy winds" = TUBAS, BALTIMORE as "Where the Sun shines", "Call it a day.or a career" = RETIRE, TIN EAR = "Liability of note?" these were all clever. Otherwise, this was a fine Sunday puzzle with the MLB teams and their places crossing at the I's being a very nice touch. Where's ETTA James when you NEED An ETTA? ETTA in a 1969 Western with the play on the last name Place, I totally missed that. I mixed up "THE SEA WOLF" with "The Cry of the Wolf" by Melvin Burgess so 74D was "cry of A WOLF" for a while, holding up all sorts of things in the SE. Have any tickets ever had "Admit Two" on them?) So 96D was LETS oN and I really didn't like RAN oNTO for "Encountered" at 118A but not admitting another USAGE to "Admits" existed meant settling for RAN oNTO. Later, when SETTEES went in, I never noticed I now had a god, eRES.īut I hate to Admits that I only thought of Admits as confessing to something and not letting someone in ("Admit One" on the ticket, sheesh. I didn't actually enter eRoS at 90A but guessed that was what it would be when I wrote in WEIMeRANER. Are the circled squares actually baseballs? Who are these "Them" that you're provin' wrong, these mythical people who militantly insist that "I" does not exist in any team name?ĮRoS and a misinterpretation of what 96D's "Admits" could mean LEADS to two errors today. Maybe in the paper / magazine version of this puzzle, there is more evident baseball content. MAJORS is totally forced into the grid at this weird, almost-but-not-central place ( 84A: Group with five members in this puzzle, with "the"). ![]() There's nothing to symmetrically complement the DETROIT / TIGERS in the south. Puzzle wants me to think HOMESTANDS is relevant baseball content, but I'm not buying it. The entire E/SE portion of the grid is devoid of theme content. And the totally uneven placement of the theme content is really bizarre. What's particularly baseball-y about that slogan? Why baseball teams? Why is there not more non-incidental baseball content? Further, is the premised of the puzzle really that there is, in fact, an "I" in certain team names? Even as jokey wordplay, this is pretty weak. I really, really should be the ideal audience for this puzzle. I wore one of my hometown AA affiliate's t-shirts to the tournament yesterday and I'm wearing another one today *and* (if the weather holds up, which right now, as I look out the window at the dark blusteriness of an impending thunderstorm, seems increasingly unlikely), I'm going to the Yankees-Orioles game later today at Camden Yards. The brand inertia that is carrying that puzzle through the ages is really something.īut anyway, this puzzle. And yet it's the marquee puzzle, the biggie, the one with a title, the one that (if traffic to my site is any indication) has the greatest solvership by numbers. " It's slightly weird to see the NYT's crossword app booming and yet routinely hear from solvers and puzzle-makers alike that Sundays just aren't fun any more (in the main). An editor I'd talked to earlier in the day casually used the phrase, "Back when I was still doing the Times. At dinner last night a veteran constructor friend of mine-and a far, far nicer human being than I or most people I know could ever hope to be-went off, unprompted, on the diminishing quality of the Sunday NYT crossword, which he no longer bothers with. It was tough to solve this thing after a beautiful day of solving really entertaining tournament puzzles at the Indie 500 Crossword Tournament. ![]()
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