It’s time for an overdue, brief, and spoiler-free recap of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament from two weeks ago. First, my performance: Each year since I started going to the tournament my ranking had gone up. Science dictated that this trend would not last forever, and this year that bill came due. I finished in 56th, down from 40th last year. I’m actually pleasantly surprised that I finished there considering I got trounced by Mike Shenk’s Puzzle 3 and left a blank square in Patrick Berry’s Puzzle 7 without realizing it. Here’s how I’m rationalizing that blank square flub: I’d had a run of three straight years of solving all ACPT puzzles perfectly with no mistakes, and I still haven’t written any wrong letters in an ACPT puzzle since 2014. I just haven’t always written *all* of the letters.
The gent who won the whole thing, Erik Agard, is someone you might recognize from this blog, if you don’t already know his name from the fun puzzles he’s written for his website, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and other outlets. He’s been a regular test-solver for me since the beginning. I’d need probably a few hundred hands to count the many ways he’s helped me improve my clues, or helped me avoid bad clues, or given me ideas for other crosswords. I’d like to think that my puzzles were helpful championship-level ACPT prep for him — and maybe they were! — but he was already a puzzle-solving speed demon by the time I came along. In any case, a huge round of congrats to Erik for his solving prowess.
The next tournament on the horizon is the Indie 500 Crossword Tournament in Washington, D.C., which Erik is helping to run. You should sign up for that.
Your friendly neighborhood cliche-less captain is back for another adventure. Baseball season is just getting underway, so what better way for him to spend his Sunday afternoon?
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- 23A: [“___, and you’ll be at home”] is STEP UP TO THE PLATE.
- 39A: [“___ include players, umpires and fans”] is BALLPARK FIGURES.
- 59A: [“___? Then the batter isn’t safe after that deep drive not to center or right”] is OUT IN LEFT FIELD.
- 69A: [“___, and there will be new batters”] is SWITCH HITTERS.
- 80A: [“___, and first, second and third will be protected by a tarp”] is COVER YOUR BASES. This, along with BALLPARK FIGURES, was what prevented me from giving this puzzle a more — ahem — obvious title of “Captain Obvious Goes to a Baseball Game.”
- 95A: [“___, and first and third will be colorful”] is PAINT THE CORNERS. If that phrase is unfamiliar to you, it’s an expression for when a pitcher throws a strike that touches the corners of the strike zone. It has nothing to do with the corners on the baseball diamond like the Captain thinks it does.
- 118A: [“___, and you won’t see another game for maybe 12 months”] is WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. This doesn’t have to be strictly a baseball expression, of course, and yet whenever I heard it growing up, it was primarily a lament for the Cubs. I imagine that Astros fans said it a lot until last year, too.
Not that this is the most notable thing about Captain Obvious puzzles, but all five that I’ve written for the Post have had exactly seven theme answers. I think that’s because most cliches tend to be on the longer side of most theme entries (say, 14 letters or longer), so I don’t have as much room to accommodate more of them. The Captain can only use his superpowers seven times in a single day, it seems. It’s tough fighting word crimes.
Some other answers and clues:
- 74A: [Memorable obscurity?] is ECLIPSE. My favorite clue today.
- 79A: [Phi ___ Jama (dunking nickname of Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler’s college hoops team)] is Phi SLAMA Jama. I didn’t make this up. Really! It was a thing back in the ’80s. My hope is that the “dunking nickname” part of the clue helped because SLAMA bailed me out of a — ahem — jam. I suppose I could have made this SLAMS and then gone with SPS at 69D, a shortening for Navy officers who work for the Shore Patrol, though I don’t know how common the plural is.
- 106A: [Elderly neighbor of Jon, in “Garfield” comics] is REBA. She’s probably a deep cut as far as “Garfield” characters go, and much less common in crosswords than ODIE, but I figured she’d be a good alternative to various McEntire clues.
- 111A: [Green Day drummer] is TRÉ COOL. Or as he is known in France, Very Cool.
- Some non-baseball sports clues found their way to the top of the grid. There’s GOLFERS at 11D: [Iron workers?], ALTA at 13D: [Resort with a run called Alf’s High Rustler], and LINE JUDGES at 15D: [Fault-finders?]. And again there’s SLAMA near the 9 o’clock position.
- 104D: [Vehicle used in some gimmicks for the WWE’s Undertaker] is HEARSE. One of those gimmicks is the Last Ride match where the loser gets locked in the back of a hearse and then driven out of the arena. Objectively, this is a better WWE gimmick than the Mantaur of the 1990s.
See you next week!
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