New York Times, Saturday, October 3, 2015

For years I have posed the following puzzle to fellow baseball fans: can you explain how a QUADRUPLE PLAY can occur and why the fourth out would be necessary? (I believe this has actually never occurred in major league baseball.) No one I've asked so far has been able to answer this correctly. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to solve it (or google it).

I thought this would be a cool entry in crossword puzzle (my seed entry) but thought that providing a good clue for it would be a challenge. Anyway, I guess Will Shortz thought it would be a fun entry also.

COLOR WHEEL and SQUEAK TOY were my secondary seeds.

Interesting layout. As I solved, I thought there weren't very many long slots, but it turns out there are quite a few — just more spread out than I'm used to. I really liked the colorful KNEE BENDS and SPLIT ENDS types of entries. Nice to see a few more in STALE JOKE, FRONT PAGE, and COLOR WHEEL. Spacing the great stuff around the grid has the beneficial effect of not having all your best material only concentrated in the four corners.

QUADRUPLE PLAY is going to be pretty ho-hum to the solvers who complain that crosswords feature way too much baseball. I personally like rules — more accurately, trying to figure out loopholes around them — so I had fun trying to understand this one. Seems like a fourth out can be declared in many different ways, all of which depend on extremely unlikely circumstances.

I'll admit, I still don't really get how any of them actually work.

Given that some of the long slots were filled with neutralish answers (SCENARIO and SPOILAGE), there were fewer feature entries than I like to see in a themeless. So it's a shame two of them fell slightly short for me: SQUEAK TOY is a legitimate term, but SQUEAKY TOY sounds so much better to my ear (and it gets almost twice as many Google hits). COFFEE RUSH is a concept I understand as coffee is an important part of my day, but it doesn't sound quite right. CAFFEINE RUSH? COFFEE BUZZ? COFFEE HIGH? Hmm, not sure — none of them sounds dead-on perfect.

Some tough entries/clues in the puzzle:

• FiOS apparently is a Verizon service, apparently standing for "Fiber Optic Service."
• How is TWIT a [Goose]? I believe it's in the "silly goose" sense.
• OYEZ! is a term I learned from crosswords. I didn't know it could be spelled OYES, which made it very hard to guess correctly, especially considering ...
• DELOS. Dang it, I got fooled by knowledge that Barry likes to work in J Q X Zs. I filled in DELOZ with such confidence. Sigh.

Yes, a baseball QUADRUPLE PLAY is at least theoretically possible according to the rules. A fourth out can be called to cancel a scored run on a triple play that should be disallowed because of, say, a base-running error. Baseball-Reference.com has an example.

I applaud a puzzle that encourages you to look up something that you not only didn't know, but that you assumed must be impossible. Bravo.