Sunday March 31st 2019, NY Times Crossword

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Time: 47:35
Sunday Average: 47:42
Best Sunday: 21:55

Title: Take One For The Team

Andrew Ries is probably my favorite crossword constructor for his Aries Themeless Puzzles that he publishes online, so I'm always excited to see his name come up on the NY Times Crossword app. However, I don't love his themed puzzles as much because he doesn't seem to enjoy the same cluing flexibility here. He sneaks in some of his patented excessive cleverness here and there, but mostly we just end up with still a very strong Sunday crossword, just not quite that Aries special, I suppose.

As you can see from the title, we have a number of baseball teams SLUNK into the gray squares each with an one extra letter that you should take to get the team name. Thus (I'm italicizing the gray areas and underlining the team names), you get ASPIRATES, MEAT SAUCE, CASTRO STREET, SCRUB SUITS, TELEVANGELISM, FRED SAVAGE, PAID RESPECTS, GRAY SCALE, and PORT WINES. I figured out almost all of these after the fact, but the Mets in the NW corner helped me with that area. ALLELE was completely unfamiliar to me but apparently means "one of two or more alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation." Helpful word for a crossword!

Ultimately, I lost a lot of time at the end with the crossing "Smooth-talking" for which I confidently wrote in wILY and "List for charitable givers, for short" for which I figured wRGS was some list of ORGS that I'd never heard of. OILY doesn't seem right to me, but I suppose I have to let it go.

And here we have crosswords continuing to insist that EL-HI is a thing that humans say to refer to grades 1-12. How do we put a stop to this insidious conspiracy?

I just barely missed the Trump/Kim meeting in HANOI, which was a small mercy. Instead, I just got to enjoy one of the best cities for hopping on the back of a motorbike and traveling from bar to bar. I could stand to spend more time in Vietnam.

Is Bull MOOSE referring to Roosevelt's Progressive Party? That clue came out of nowhere for me, but I eventually figured out the RCA DOME crossing it.

Now I have some G&T's ON ICE upstairs, or I will shortly anyway.  I should be DEALING with that. Cheers!

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