MGWCC #931

MGWCC crossword 2:21
meta 1:30 [3.90 avg; 5 ratings] rate it

hello, and welcome to episode #931 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 1 puzzle called “Top of the Lineup”. to welcome back baseball season, matt has given us this slightly smaller (11×11) grid with these theme answers:

• {*Venomous viper of the Southwest} DIAMONDBACK.
• {*”Million Dollar Baby” beat it for Best Picture} RAY. dead-center, but easy to miss because it’s so short.
• {*Someone who rescues a child lost in a national park, say} BRAVE RANGER. dubious entry in terms of lexical nature, but it’s abundantly clear now that the theme is baseball teams. but {Like a famous reindeer (not a theme entry!)} RED-NOSED isn’t one of them, despite that distracting RED; the fact that it stands out so much more than RAY is what necessitated the *s in the clues for week 1.
• finally, the last across answer is {Thinking ___ (they can metaphorically help people solve metas…or, parsed differently, what you should be doing to solve this particular meta)} CAPS. i’m not sure i would call it reparsing—it’s the same two words. but reinterpreting, sure.

anyway, if we’re thinking CAPS, we probably want the letters on the caps worn by each of these baseball teams. the arizona DIAMONDBACKs have an A, the tampa bay RAYs have TB, and the BRAVE RANGERs… okay, no, that’s two teams. the atlanta BRAVEs also have A and the texas RANGERs have T:

put those all together and you get AT BAT, which is a baseball term. or, for that matter, AT-BAT, which is a related but separate baseball term; AT BAT is an adverbial phrase describing the current batter and AT-BAT is a noun, denoting an instance of a player batting, that can be pluralized (and indeed the number of AT-BATs is the denominator when you calculate batting average).

this was certainly a simple enough meta for a week 1, but i enjoyed the reinterpretation of the phrase “thinking caps” in the reveal answer—perhaps it wasn’t entirely necessary to solve the meta, but it was fun. from a crossword perspective, it was perhaps a little clunky to have theme answers of such varying lengths, including one very short one, and one that was a made-up phrase of two team names stuck together. but i wasn’t overly worked up about it.

how’d you all like this one?