The New York Times’ Connections: Sports Edition puzzle has a reputation for getting tricky, and puzzle 573 doesn’t disappoint. Today’s groupings range from straightforward to genuinely obscure, with one category that demands some serious baseball history knowledge.
The yellow group sets the tone with relative ease. All four answers represent AL East teams: Blue Jays, Orioles, Rays, and Yankees. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Major League Baseball should handle this one without breaking a sweat.
When Football Positions Get Deconstructed
Things get slightly trickier in the green category, which plays with the first words of football position titles. The answers here are defensive, running, tight, and wide. It’s a clever construction that rewards players who can think beyond the positions themselves and see the linguistic pattern connecting them. This one separates casual fans from people who’ve actually spent time parsing football terminology.
The blue category pivots to international soccer with Premier League managers: Emery, Guardiola, Moyes, and Slot. This is where the puzzle starts demanding real technology-adjacent knowledge, assuming you’re keeping up with modern football management trends. Guardiola and Moyes are household names in sports circles, but Slot represents a newer generation of elite managers. It’s a solid mix of established and current figures.
The Dodgers Deep Dive
Then there’s the purple group, and this is where today’s puzzle gets properly wild. The category asks for nicknames for the Dodgers franchise across different eras: Bridegrooms, Dodgers, Robins, and Superbas.
Most modern fans know the team as the Dodgers, full stop. But the franchise’s naming history runs deep. The Bridegrooms name dates back to the 1890s, when the team apparently had multiple players who got married around the same time. The Robins came later, named after manager Wilbert Robinson in the 1920s. The Superbas reference is perhaps the most obscure to contemporary audiences, harking back to a vaudeville act that the team somehow branded itself around.
This category isn’t just testing whether you know baseball. It’s testing whether you’ve read enough baseball history to understand that sports franchises didn’t start with their current names and logos. The Dodgers have been through several identities, and the puzzle expects you to know at least some of them.
What This Puzzle Reveals
Connections: Sports Edition operates differently from the regular NYT Connections puzzle. It’s published through The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism platform owned by the Times, and while it doesn’t appear in the main NYT Games app, you can play it free online or through The Athletic’s own application.
The puzzle’s difficulty curve today is actually well-calibrated. The yellow and green groups are accessible to most sports enthusiasts. The blue group requires specific knowledge about current soccer management. But that purple group? It’s basically asking whether you respect the sport enough to know where it came from.
That’s the real test of a good puzzle, isn’t it. Not just whether you know the answers, but whether you’re willing to dig into the overlooked details of sports history that casual viewers skip right over.
