"Playing Dress-Up" June 23, 2023

[escapeartist]

"HMMPH I would never have gotten that!"

[benchen71]

This Aussie puzzler had no hope with this one! The only US mascot I could name (and thus recognise if I found it hiding in a grid) is Gritty, thanks to watching "Abbot Elementary". And then, even after one nudge got me to the mascots, I needed another nudge to remind me that teams have scoreboard abbreviations. It seems that some degree of familiarity would have been needed for me to make those meta jumps!

Let's hope the next WSJ meta doesn't leave me sitting in Isaac's nursing another "international disadvantage", which is definitely not my (made-up) cocktail of choice!

[JeanneC]

Are those mascots by any chance on Tarot cards?
Just kidding. Just because I didn’t see the answer doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fun puzzle. Congrats to those who solved!

[oldjudge]

LOL, this puzzle has as much to do with knowing baseball as knowing the usher’s names at Lincoln Center has to do with knowing music. I’m sure there have been dumber ideas for a WSJ meta in the past but unfortunately I can’t think of any.

[hcbirker]

So here’s my case for my first answer:
Guardians
Astros
Rockies
Blue Jays

GARB

Not elegant, but fits the title.

[JerryF]

Never in a million years.......

[Jace54]

I figured that 19A “clew” had to be part of the answer, because a typical crossword would use “claw” crossing with 12D “tman”. I noticed the potential baseball theme from “slider”, “ace”, and “dinger” but abandoned it for awhile because “orbit” did not seem to fit.

Eventually I Googled “orbit baseball” and discovered the mascot theme, which revealed why “clew” was necessary.

A bonus from this meta is that I now know that Clark is the Cubs mascot. I have been a Cubs fan since 1982 but could not have named the mascot.

[Inca]

Made a really good call this week. At first I thought "Playing Dress Up", sounds like it's "gettable" for me. But after a little while, I decided, "Nope, not going to spend too much time on this one." As I usually do, I stopped by again late on Sunday, to give myself that last-minute second chance and that's when that little bit of intution that was telling me to leave this one alone became clear. I saw the slider and said, "Oh, no! Baseball?". A tiny bit of googling found me Orbit the mascot...and honestly that's when I stopped. I simply didn't want to google anything about baseball and so....Nice puzzle and congrats to all who solved. I think your odds of winning mug this week are pretty good....relatively speaking

[escapeartist]

The "UP" in the title had me looking at MOTTO and ELBA and others all weekend.

I was sniffing the wrong hydrant all weekend long.

[Bonnibel]

At first I submitted GARB but then slept on it and finally saw WEAR.

So I resubmitted (probably not allowed) with an explanation. However I do think both answers fit the puzzle, though obviously WEAR is the correct answer.

I learned an important lesson: DO NOT submit the in-elegant answer, no matter how well it seems to fit, until you've slept on it. Mike Shenk is brilliant and I should have waited to see the full meta reveal itself to me.

Anagramming to the answer is almost never necessary, most answers are in clue order or grid pattern/order.

Fantastic puzzle! Would love that mug but regardless, I count this as a win for me this week.

[burak]

Niche meta, would have been a great solve if I knew about, um, baseball mascots?

Here's my nit to pick: Shenkian metas -with less arbitrary techniques/knowledge required- usually have a clue or an answer that nudges the reader. This one had nothing, nada, nil and it's about baseball mascots ffs.

[Conrad]

To quote myself: This meta is fair and Shenkian

Read my Crossword Fiend post. https://crosswordfiend.com/2023/06/25/w ... e-25-2023/

Pay attention to techniques #1 and #2.

Then report back.

[mheberlingx100]

Haven’t been a baseball enthusiast since I was a kid. Off the top of my head I could name three mascots - the Philly Phanatic, the San Diego Chicken, and Mr. Met. Only a lucky consultation with Mr. G for the relationship of baseball and orbit put me on the right track.

Funny, I saw early on “wear” as the last letter of the short entries on the long across lines, but had no logic for it. So kept that as my Hail Mary in case I couldn’t properly solve the meta.

[burak]

Haven’t been a baseball enthusiast since I was a kid. Off the top of my head I could name three mascots - the Philly Phanatic, the San Diego Chicken, and Mr. Met. Only a lucky consultation with Mr. G for the relationship of baseball and orbit put me on the right track.

That's a very good point. I get that it's hard to have Phanatic, Met or Wally as the second word of the themers, but these are mascots that most people are expected to have heard of. Ace? Slider? We talking about Slider? I really would've liked a clue/entry pointing at mascots, innings, MLB... anything.

[MajordomoTom]

Didn't get
Didn't guess
Don't care
Sleep time

Fredbird didn't make the cut

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

This was one where a little bit of knowledge was dangerous. I'm a big baseball guy and so gravitated to "slider", "ace", and "dinger" as baseball terms. And then I saw "orbit" and said "That was the mascot of the Houston Astros in the 80s, but there's no way a 30-year old mascot would be used in a meta!" It turns out, he was actually a mascot in the 90s, went away, and then returned in 2013 when the Astros moved to the American League, and so stopped playing my hometown Padres regularly. I could have named Dinger as the Colorado mascot, the only NL team, but did not know Ace or Slider. I assumed I knew enough not to have to try Googling until I was prodded to pick up the baseball thread again.

Other distractors in this puzzle, none deep enough to be a rabbit hole, but enough to draw focus...
Dress-Up:
PA(n)TS, (s)HOES, fLyingACE
BACKslider, FlyingACE, rockBOTTOM
Shift Dress => Shift Up? Shift up a letter or up on a keyboard?
Playing:
Play games? HUmdiNGER Games?
Stage plays? TARTUffe?
Lance and Epees?
Puzzle:
Clew = clue? abSOLVABLE

[vandono]

I wasn't even in the ballpark on this one.

[woozy]

The only baseball mascot I know is the Capital City Goofball.

Anyway googling actuall failed because....

There's a company called ACE and they make Rock Sliders (whatever the #### those are) for trucks. So if you put ACE as the first of the four words you'll get dozens of hits of the truck sliders. You'll get a few other things and a page about the mascot Dinger but it is an isolated page and you'll have no reason to guess this is about baseball mascot than about sugarless gum. (You might ask "why the #### were you putting ACE as your first word" and ... I forget... I had a reason that made sense at the time).

I was nudged to consider the mascot dinger and I eventually got it but...

I second the comment that metas about mystery themes usually have a hint to the theme. Consider the Tarot Card one a few weeks ago... those who hated it, think of how much more you would have hated it if there was no reference to the Fool or anything about Tarot or cards anywhere. I think people assume baseball knowledge is more ubiquitous than it is. I was a little surprised that people didn't know Tarot cards as much as I would have assumed they do.

[Laura M]

I'm so ignorant about sports I really had no idea at all where to even begin Googling, although actually I did notice WEAR formed from the last letters of the entries opposite what I assumed were the themers. Unfortunately that didn't seem like enough of a reason to submit!

Glad I didn't spend a lot of time on this one, although it was worthwhile to me in the end for one interesting etymological discovery. I wasn't familiar with the "ball of thread" definition of 19A; I thought "clew" was just an old-fashioned spelling of clue? I looked it up:

(ARCHAIC) A ball of thread, especially with reference to the thread supposedly used by Theseus to mark his way out of the Cretan labyrinth.

So basically the word clue came about because detectives finding clues in a case is analogous to following a trail of thread out of a labyrinth? I never put that together before! Mind blown (it doesn't take much, admittedly).

Congrats to all the sports fans (and others) who solved!

[woozy]

The "UP" in the title had me looking at MOTTO and ELBA and others all weekend.

I was sniffing the wrong hydrant all weekend long.

I thought DINE directly above SATE (which was next to edit) could be significant, but I figured if that was mechanism it'd have been more tightly done to have no palindrome like LOL or any "can that be a word... maybe"

EDIT. Also I seem to be one of the few who didn't think CLEW was suspicious looking and is a word I frequently use sometimes as a ball of yarn (I have knitters in my family) but more frequently as the bottom of a sail (opposite the Tack... Tack, Head, Clew... as my sailing instructors used mnemonize THC; Berkeley in the 60s...). At any rate, I certainly think about the word CLEW more frequently than I think about baseball mascots.