"Put A Little Spin On The Ball" March 21, 2025

[haydendog]

Ashore with a nudge! Or it might have been a shove.

[Libbypibby]

On the boat. No bottom of the ninth heroics tonight.

[Googly]

[hcbirker]

[hcbirker]

[Relic]

Oh, that's why I didn't get it. Congratulations to the solvers!

[Abide]

Home field advantage:

[SometimesStumped]

Wow. I did NOT get the meta answer and my head is spinning. I would never have gotten this one. My submission was a triple crown winner who played in Cuba (TRE/THREE and CROWN/TIARA) was NOIRE and was a 1976 (the year of The Bad News Bears) inductee. He was a lefty. This was fun but proves I should’ve stayed on the boat with Isaac—turns out my island was abandoned! oh! P.S. And he may have “tossed a no hitter” —in that he once punched an umpire.

[Colin]

Alternatively….
SANDY KOUFAX
As suggested by the title, the clue, 17A and 25A, the answer is a left-handed, spinning pitcher who has tossed no hitters and is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Bear in mind this is from someone who knows very little about baseball, but is ok at Googling… albeit somewhat skeptical at some of the “AI” answers on this topic!

[VanVeen]

Holy cow (as that guy who has a steakhouse next here in Chicago might say), I got it.

But not the way it was intended.

I figured the answer must be a four-letter name since there were four theme clues. I googled hall of fame pitchers and wrote down all the ones with last names that were four letters long.

There was Nolan Ryan, Babe Ruth and a handful of others of whom I’d never heard.

I tried to backsolve Ryan and Ruth for a while before I saw Dizzy Dean. Spin? Dizzy? Could that be it, I thought. With no other ideas I sent it in. Didn’t even see the D-E-A-Ns.

Had that dude’s last name had five or more letters, I never would have gotten it.

[woozy]

Well, my first thought of an answer was Edna Scheer.

She is a pitcher and she is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I'd say I'm sticking with it. Except... I didn't. With a google search on Hall of fame pitchers, it was right there. (I'm kind of glad I got a sports one that some sports fans missed.)

[Mirage]

Boy, did I land on the wrong beach! I submitted Sandy Koufax as my answer. He was one of five 17A left-handed pitchers that pitched 25A no-hitters and was in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I narrowed it down to Sandy Koufax because he played for a Southern California baseball team like Walter Matthau in 42A The Bad News Bears and set record 56A attendance at his games. Additionally, I saw the clue for 30D Crown’s cousin as a reference to the Triple Crown. The answer to 30D TIARA crosses the answer to 41A THREE, a shoutout to Koufax achieving the Triple Crown three times. And then there’s the clue to 53A It’s close to khaki. Surely Sandy is close to the color khaki. It all made perfect sense to me. Oh well, back to the dugout…

[JeanneC]

Wow. I put the word “spin” in front of several words (example “cheetah”) and then added a letter (“a”) between spin and the “ch” in cheetah. Gave me “spinach”.I got as far as “Dea” with that mechanism but figured I just missed the last letter and it had to be Dizzy Dean.

[Homer Buckle]

From Ogden Nash's poem Lineup for Yesterday:

D is for Dean,
The grammatical Diz,
When they asked, Who's the tops?
Said correctly, I is.

[Darth]

The Empire Strikes Out. (It was Spring Break and Darth had no motivation to research baseball hall of famers. It seems he should have tried to Google because Dizzy Dean seems like the obvious answer...at least in hindsight!) :D
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For a bit of Midi-sized Meta fun, try One for the Boys
:

[Mister Squawk]

Spent some time looking for pitchers named Dan before I tumbled to it.

[Miki]

Here's the link to the TikTok hint.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2n8NWL9/

Original song with the lyrics "take attendance and spin, spin, spin..."

In the entry for best rabbit hole I would like to suggest two options.
1. "Put A ...spin" from the title got me Warren Spahn, left handed pitcher, threw no hitters and brought up attendance.
Spin+ a (-i+ h) ???

2. Circular ( spin)
candy = smarties
Candy Cummings
The player who invented the curve ball

Either way, I learned more about baseball history this weekend.

[krf]

My first guess from the title was Dizzy Dean ( I used to listen to Diz and Buddy Blattner do the game of the week. But I got sucked in by a Babe Ruth rabbit hole: Take the H off SWATH and get SWAT as in "Sultan of". He batted left, wore number THREE, got TOSSED out of a game when he was pitching but ended up getting credit for a combined NOHITTER with his replacement, and finallyh THEBAdnewsBEars -- THEBABE

[mlvilv]

Oh interesting. I did actually see that right away but it never occurred to me to turn that into a name. I could’ve wrapped that up on Thursday. Oh well I had fun at the bar.

[Zobo3737]

Home field advantage:


Screenshot 2025-03-20 235010.png

Me, too. I grew up in St Louis, and, although Diz played before my time, every boy in StL knows about Dizzy and his brother Daffy.