IMPORTANT NOTE: As of January 2015 MGWCC is a subscribers-only crossword. The cost is $26 per year, and you can subscribe (or get a free trial month first) here:
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Umpire State of Mind”
Instructions: This week’s contest answer is what happened (precisely) on the eighth pitch.
Answer: CALLED BALL FOUR
Shockingly (to me) difficult Week 5 to ring in the 600s. My original Week 5 idea hadn’t panned out, so I was sheepishly offering up what I thought was a Week 3 or 4, and had considered adding an “I owe you a real Week 5 soon” note along with it by way of apology. When JanglerNPL’s correct entry arrived just 21 minutes after the puzzle went out, I figured my Week 3-4 assessment had been correct. But then…
…nothing. Was everyone traveling for the holiday? A couple of correct entries trickled in that afternoon, but I was mystified. Supertester, who is extraordinarily good at gauging difficulty of metas, assured me that it was just holiday travel: “This is not an ‘only 4 solves by Friday midnight’ difficulty puzzle.” But it was! More entries came in over the weekend and through to the deadline, but by the end, just 73 solvers got the correct answer, and just 21 of those were solo solves. Let’s take a look at the carnage.
Definitely a SAD (Simple and Difficult) meta, which only requires one sentence to explain: Take the balls-and-strikes count after each pitch, then extract the correspondingly-numbered letters from the other entry on the pitch’s row. So:
After a pitch that’s TAKEN HIGH, which is a ball, the count is 1-0.
STRIKE ONE, so the count is 1-1.
FOUL TIP, so the count is 1-2.
HIT FOUL, so the count is still 1-2.
OUTSIDE, so the count is 2-2. Could be ambiguous, since an outside pitch could still be swung at. But then the batter would be out, so if we’re still getting pitches then that means it must’ve been a ball.
BALL THREE, so the count is 3-2. Also removing any doubt about the 1-2 pitch!
FOULED OFF, so the count is still 3-2.
Now let’s extract the letters. While solving you noticed a mystery A hiding in the third row’s only black square; 17-A was [Get into, as a computer system] yielding CCESS instead of “access,” and 23-D was [“Great minds think ___”] yielding just LIKE instead of “alike,” so that black square must have an A in it.
But why? To serve as the 0 in the 1-0 count. So for a 1-0 count we take the first letter of CCESS, which is C, and then the zeroth letter, which is the hidden A in ACCESS.
So we’ve got CA, and the rest are more straightforward:
1-1 of LOWES is a double-L, so LL
1-2 of EDD is ED
1-2 of BAR NONE is BA
2-2 of ILK is another double L, so LL
3-2 of GO FOR is FO
3-2 of CRUMB is UR
Put those together and you’ve got CALLED BALL FOUR.
So what made this one so fiendishly difficult? After reading dozens of explanations from solvers via e-mail, comments on Fiend, and comments made while submitting…I’m still not quite sure. Using the ball-and-strike count after each pitch seemed like the first or second thing solvers would look at, and then using the other word on the pitch row seemed like first or second thing you’d try after that (I’d used this same extraction method in MGWCC #577 a few months ago).
I thought I’d left a number of hints pointing to this second part, but somehow they didn’t tip the vast majority of solvers off strongly enough: 1) each of the pitches has only one other entry on its row, while every other entry has two or more other words on its row; 2) HIT FOUL is asymmetrically placed, suggesting that its corresponding entry might be important, and 3) the hidden A in the first pitch suggests that something odd is going on there, and the 0 in the first count is the only 0 in any of the counts. So a lot of hintage, but it turned out to be Week 5-level hintage.
I wonder how many more solvers would have gotten this if I had included my “Sorry this is just a Week 3 or 4 meta” note? The Week 5-hood of this one may have had many in a mindset to look at complex ideas first. Here’s Brian Kell‘s (ultimately successful) path, as an example:
Wow, I stared at this all weekend, including a flight from Atlanta to Munich. Here’s how I was hoping the meta worked very early on, but of course it didn’t pan out: The middle part of the grid (three squares in from the edge, bounded by the single black squares) is the strike zone. The A in the black square is the first pitch, which is high. Then you need to figure out where the other pitches are (presumably they’re B, C, D, …), and then something something. I got as far as putting a B in the square above 50-Down and an F to the left of 20-Across, which match the corresponding pitches and kinda fit the clues (bitty-bitty? face card?), and then another A for some reason to the left of 63-Across (AAA batteries are roughly two inches too), before I decided this wasn’t going to work. At one point, when thinking about what possible things could happen on the eighth pitch, I hit on the pun BALFOUR DECLARATION. I guess that wasn’t so far off from the actual answer!
A lot of solvers had an experience like this, which are maddening since they’ve also had experiences where you go down this crazy trail and you’re about to give up when…you realize you’ve just solved the meta! This oft-memed scene from It’s Always Sunny seems fitting (some NSFW language).
That’s Week 5 metas, I guess?
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 73 correct entries received, is Meg Duvall of St. Petersburg, Fla. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil, and notepad set, Meg will also receive a signed copy of my book Mental Floss Crunchy Crosswords.
MONTHLY PRIZES:
Gaaah! I blanked on these again. Will award 12 next week as the usual penance.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is how MGWCC solvers handle metas.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.