MGWCC crossword 2:34
meta 10ish 
[3.75 avg; 8 ratings] rate it
hello, and welcome to episode #893 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “One If by Land”. this week, we are looking for one of the ten MLB teams mentioned in the theme entries (not necessarily one of the two that’s mentioned twice). indeed, there are six theme answers that are all pairs of baseball teams, clued (i assume; i haven’t fact-checked them all) by when they will play each other this season:
- {They’ll play on Sept. 28 (2)} MARINERS-DODGERS.
- {They’ll play on July 21st (4)} TIGERS-PIRATES.
- {They’ll play on August 4th (5)} TWINS-TIGERS.
- {They’ll play on September 1st (1)} BLUE JAYS-REDS.
- {They’ll play on August 29th (6)} RED SOX-PIRATES.
- {They’ll play on July 12th (3)} BRAVES-CARDINALS. i suppose this has now happened! atlanta won, 7-6. the future tense was correct when matt sent out the puzzle on friday, though.
in addition, there are a couple of other clueful-looking entries: {Take a bus, perhaps (as baseball teams might to play each other)} TRAVEL and {Something a baseball team’s bus might need to stop for in the middle of a road trip} GAS. taken together, all of this suggests looking at halfway points between the locations of the two baseball teams in each themer. the six parenthetical numbers in the clues are a permutation of 1 to 6, so presumably that is an ordering on the six letters we are going to extract from them. it’s still unclear what we’re going to extract, though—maybe a city near the halfway point, maybe just the state, or maybe a baseball team.
okay, well, let’s look at a map:
well, it’s not going to be an MLB team halfway in between the braves and cardinals, because there isn’t one. roughly speaking, there is a team near the halfway point of every other pair, though: the A’s between the mariners and dodgers, the guardians between the tigers and pirates, the brewers between the twins and tigers, the guardians again between the jays and reds, and the yankees and mets between the red sox and pirates (but the yankees slightly closer, as the bronx is to the north and west of queens and thereby closer to that line).
it does look like there might be exactly one state that connects each of the states of these pairs, though:
- between the blue jays and guardians, michigan is the only state that borders both ontario and ohio.
- between seattle (washington) and LA (california), we get oregon.
- between atlanta (georgia) and st louis (missouri), we have tennessee.
- between detroit (michigan) and pittsburgh (pennsylvania), we have ohio.
- between minneapolis (minnesota) and detroit (michigan), we have wisconsin.
- between boston (massachusetts) and pittsburgh (pennsylvania), we have new york.
taking the first letters of those states spells out MOTOWN, which points to detroit, so the TIGERS are the meta answer. indeed, they are one of the teams mentioned twice, but that’s just a coincidence. the number of things you can spell using the first letters of states between two baseball teams is a little bit limited—in particular, you can’t get an S, as there’s no pair of teams in states sandwiching south carolina or south dakota.
i’m pretty into both sports and geography, so i thought this was a fun mechanism. it might have been a little more accessible if something in the title, instructions, or theme answers had indicated that we were interested in states, rather than cities or baseball teams. but there weren’t all that many options, and looking at the map pretty quickly cleared up which looked the most promising, so this didn’t hold me up too much.
other bits & bobs:
- {Peppa Pig’s new baby sister} EVIE. had no idea—my kids have aged out of the peppa pig demographic, and i’ve never seen it.
- {It may end 6-0} SET. or two of them might, as in the unfortunate case of the women’s final from wimbledon on saturday. yikes. but after two dramatic, gripping three-set women’s finals at the australian open and roland garros this year, perhaps we were due for a clunker.
- {Classic record label} EMI. i’m not sure if this was intended to be a thematic lagniappe with MOTOWN, but i noticed it and so i’m pointing it out.
that’s all from me. how’d you find this one?
“in the middle of a road trip” threw me off, so I spent a ton of time focusing on team and cities around halfway points between those two places. I even asked for Google Maps directions from the stadiums lol. Of course the mechanism was more straightforward then that.
I agree with Joon that a nudge towards states would’ve made this more of a Week 2.
Thanks, joon — 210 correct entries received, 122 of which were solo solves. So Week 2 curse-ish territory…
The title and two long clues made it clear the meta was geography based, but my co-solver and I worked on it for three days without ever getting close. We tried mapping the road trip to see if it formed a picture, we did loads of other things with the various cities but finding six unrelated cities in between the theme ones never occurred to us. We were certain we needed to use the home team exclusively because why would Matt include the dates otherwise? We were convinced the dates pointed us to the correct city to be used, rather than using both.
I was stuck on cities/towns and never even considered states. I was scouring Google Maps and using various different online tools to compute the midpoint between cities in different ways, and nothing gave a satisfactory result.
When reviewing the MLB schedules, I noticed something interesting: for each of the 6 games that were clued, the visiting team is in the midst of a 2-city road trip. E.g. for Blue Jays–Reds, the Blue Jays were on a road trip visiting the Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees. So, arguably we could compute the “middle” of that road trip by looking at the halfway point between Cincinnati and New York, using Google Maps driving directions (as hinted by all of the bus travel).
Doing this for the 6 games in order, I came up with:
1) Midpoint of Cincinnati, OH and New York, NY is roughly PITTSBURGH, PA (Blue Jays road trip)
2) Midpoint of Phoenix, AZ and Seattle, WA is ??? (Dodgers road trip)
3) Midpoint of West Sacramento, CA and St. Louis, MO is ??? (Braves road trip)
4) Midpoint of Arlington, TX and Pittsburgh, PA is ??? (Tigers road trip)
5) Midpoint of Cleveland, OH and Detroit, MI is roughly TOLEDO, OH (Twins road trip)
6) Midpoint of St. Louis, MO and Boston, MA is roughly ERIE, PA (Pirates road trip)
This looked like it might be trying to spell PIRATE, so from there I tried to backsolve some justification for that.
If you use Oakland as a starting point for the Athletics (which would be a mistake, but I considered that as a possibility since they only just moved to West Sacramento this year), the halfway point between that and St. Louis is RAWLINS, WY, so that could give an R.
If you look at driving directions from Arlington, TX to Pittsburgh on Goolge Maps, the primary route doesn’t give anything good, but one of the alternate routes has its midpoint very close to ANNA, IL, so that could give an R.
Phoenix to Seattle gave me more trouble, none of the 3 routes given by Google Maps had any towns of significant size starting with an I near their midpoints. The best I could find was Idavada, ID along the central route up US-93, which is extremely insignificant.
I’m glad the solution did not involve assuming the A’s played in Oakland or using some specific tool to compute the exact midpoint, as otherwise I was prepared to be mad at Matt about those. Still, I’d’ve liked the states angle to be clued more strongly.
I think I tried all those too!
After trying numerous means of getting letters via travel routes, I hit on a different path. I did it by how the mascots travel, producing Minnesota. My reasoning was that you can group these mascots into three groups. By Sea: Mariners, Pirates. By Air: Blue Jays, Cardinals. By Land: Dodgers, Tigers, Twins, Reds, Red Sox, Braves.
Minnesota is the only team paired solely with another “land”-traveling partner. The Tigers in their other pairing are with the Pirates – who travel by sea. But I like the actual answer. Clearly, it’s more elegant than mine.
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 5 stars
I love baseball and geography, so it was a winner from me! There’s also a decent overlap in Cubs-Tigers fans, I think, doubly so now that Báez is on the Tigers. Wouldn’t mind seeing a Cubs-Tigers World Series later this year!
The Tigers vs anyone is the World Series I’d like to see. I get to their games regularly and would have been embarrassed not to have figured out this meta. It took me days, but fortunately I got there in the end.
Week 2?? Pretty complicated ☹️
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4 stars
In desperation and thinking “two if by sea”, I submitted the BRAVES, as Atlanta seemed to be the only city among the themers that isn’t on a prominent body of water (river, bay, lake, etc.). But there was no “click” so I knew that wouldn’t be right. In hindsight, the title is really good; wish I had SUSSED it.
I also got nowhere but figured the odds of a Hail Mary were better than usual, so convinced myself “two if by sea” could be important, then further convinced myself that amongst the two seaside cities (Seattle and LA) it had to be Seattle because it started with “sea,” so submitted the Mariners. Gong. Delusional, I know, but hey, I have a good time…
I guessed Seattle as a Hail Mary since it was the furthest away. The others seemed like a one day drive and that was the only two day drive.
I got as far as looking for the midway points between the teams, but I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t think about it being a single state bordering both states of origin. The Massachusetts-Pennsylvania one especially made me think I was off track, because there are so many possible routes that might go through Connecticut or Rhode Island or New Jersey… I guess probably if I looked at a ROAD map (as implied by the bus clues), the best route would only go through New York.
A ball team might not buy gas in the ‘middle’ of a road trip. They might buy gas on the trip to the game(s) or on the trip back, but in the middle of the road trip they’re playing ball.
Can anyone explain how the date of the game is part of the meta or why it was included? It definitely threw me off.
the date does not directly participate in the meta. my best guess is that it was included to emphasize that these are real games between real teams that will travel to different cities to play each other.
in general, though, there was enough to think about just from the teams in the grid (and the two bonus thematic clues) that i wouldn’t have gone looking in the theme clues for more; you have to put something in the theme clues, and the dates of the games are as good as anything else.
There was certainly some extraneous information in there. As joon said, they emphasize the fact that they’re real baseball games, but aside from that there was a lot of freedom for Matt to pick any of the multiple dates in the season where those two teams play each other in each entry.
In 2 of the 6 them answers, the home team was listed first, while in 4 of 6 the away team was listed first. In 4 of 6, the given date was the 1st game of a 3-game series, in 1 it was the 2nd game of a 3-game series, and in 1 it was the 3rd game of a 3-game series. (Most series are 3-games, though there are occasionally scheduled 2- and 4-game series.)
If it were up to me, I’d have written the grid entries to use a consistent home/away ordering (e.g. always putting the home team first), and I’d have chosen the dates in the clues to be the first scheduled game between the two given teams. That way there’s no extra information in the clues to read into that can distract solvers.
If this were a Mystery Hunt puzzle, I’d have definitely tried to index all of those various numbers into all of the team names/city/names etc.; thankfully I had the sense here to ignore that and not waste time on random indexing.
I included the matchups because a) I thought it seemed too random just to have two teams listed with no reason for it at all and b) it helped emphasize the travel aspect of playing an away game, which I hoped would be a nudge toward the idea
Puzzle: MGWCC; Rating: 4.5 stars
A fun meta for me too. I thought we were going to use the numbers of the Interstate routes between the opponents, mostly because you can pretty much drive directly from a Mariners game to a Dodgers game just by getting on I-5 (for 1100 miles). But a quick look at a map showed me that there really aren’t direct routes between most of the other cities. And Toronto kind of eliminated that idea too. Eventually stumbled on the intervening state pattern.