New York Times, Tuesday, August 5, 2014

The initial idea for this theme hit me with the phrase "peters out." But finding some teammates for Peter, along with their baseball actions, took a really long time.

A list of possibilities sat around in my hugely bulky and totally unorganized "ideas" folder for at least a couple years, which is not at all unusual. (And which does have its disadvantages. I can't count the number of times that a percolating theme has shown up in print with someone else's byline.)

Anyway, the lengthy incubation was largely because my various permutations kept coming up short in two ways. First, I really wanted to use WOLF'S DOWN, for Wolf Blitzer, but could never get it to work. And second, I didn't want to have just one woman in the group, which is the way things kept ending up. Finally, I just got tired of seeing this, decided on the current set, and waved it goodbye in November of 2012. But now I see that the whole male-female balancing act was unnecessary because Will changed PAT from Benatar to Sajak, thereby leaving Carrie as the lone female. I never really liked using "Benatar" anyway, so I'm not real surprised at the change.

The clues! I was amazed to go through them. Other than PAT's gender transformation, my clues remained mostly intact, with only a handful of substantive changes. The one that stands out was for STATUTES at 22D. Will's is fun and mine was boring. Thanks, Will!

Wonderful puzzle today. How Lynn found five normal phrases to fit this theme is beyond me. JACKS UP, for example, is such a great base phrase (as in a store jacking up prices), plus it can be read as "Jack's up!" Beautiful idea with five solid themers.

It's also a perfect example of adding pizzazz into a puzzle without having to resort to a lot of long fill. Sure, there's the nice SORE LOSER and BOTTLE FED and BUGABOOS, but what really impresses me is Lynn's careful eye for the shorter stuff. ODD JOB. BREW PUB. JAKARTA. ALADDIN. Putting together a crossword is hard enough that sometimes it feels like a small miracle just to get a grid filled using regular words you can gloss over like… well, like GLOSS. I love it when a constructor grabs hold of each step of the filling process, carefully sorting through many options before landing on opulent words… like… like MAGI.

I like to eyeball a grid even before I start solving, and it's almost always a good sign to see white space apportioned out like this. There's nothing too big (making for a challenging fill) or too small (sectioned off areas can make for a choppy solving experience). Just right. At 78 words it hits the maximum allowed number of answers, but that matters not one bit to me. Using 76 or even 74 words can often allow for some really nice long fill, but Lynn shows that you can give a quality solving experience in 78 words too. It just takes more care, which she clearly put in here.

Finally, look how smooth the short fill is. So little to even point out. OLEO is an outdated product, but you do still see the word on some dairy aisle boxes. And NEHI may be a brand gone by the wayside, but I have fond memories of Radar O'Reilly drinking Grape Nehis on M*A*S*H. Outstanding work; bravo.