The New York Times’ Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Sunday, April 19 (puzzle No. 573) serves up a fascinating mix of difficulty levels, with the purple category proving to be the kind of head-scratcher that makes you either feel like a baseball historian or completely stumped. Published through The Athletic’s app and available free online, this puzzle manages to blend straightforward sports knowledge with genuinely obscure trivia.
The yellow category, predictably the easiest, focuses on AL East teams: Blue Jays, Orioles, Rays, and Yankees. If you follow baseball at all, this one should fall quickly. It’s the kind of warm-up that makes you feel confident before things get weird.
When Football Positions Get Grammatical
The green category takes an interesting linguistic turn. The connection here is first words of football positions: defensive, running, tight, and wide. This one hits that sweet spot where it’s not immediately obvious but clicks once you realize the pattern. It’s clever without being frustratingly obscure, which is exactly what a good mid-tier puzzle should do.
The blue category shifts gears entirely to Premier League managers: Emery, Guardiola, Moyes, and Slot. This requires a different kind of sports knowledge altogether. You need to follow international soccer rather closely to nail this one without hints. It’s a nice reminder that Connections challenges you across multiple sporting universes, not just American sports.
The Dodgers’ Many Lives
Then there’s the purple category, where things get genuinely wild. The theme is nicknames for the Dodgers franchise over time, and the answers are Bridegrooms, Dodgers, Robins, and Superbas. This is pure baseball archaeology. Most casual fans know the team as the Dodgers, period. But the purple category demands you know their entire journey from Brooklyn, including their role as the Bridegrooms in the 1880s and their various other incarnations through the early 1900s.
The hint itself nods to this history: “LA team that came from Brooklyn.” It’s poetic in its simplicity, but solving it requires either serious baseball knowledge or a willingness to research something you don’t immediately recognize. That’s what makes it genuinely difficult without feeling unfair. The puzzle isn’t hiding the connection; you either know these historical team names or you don’t.
What makes puzzle 573 interesting isn’t just its varying difficulty levels but what it reveals about how sports puzzles approach their craft. They can’t just stick to contemporary knowledge. They reach back into history, pull in international sports, and assume you might have some deeper fandom lurking somewhere. The real question is whether that’s fun or frustrating for the average player, and honestly, it depends on whether you’re the type who enjoys discovering something new about sports history.
