Welcome to the Third Annual Connections Recap. Here are the versions from 2024 and 2025 if you missed them. It will be guided by a Lookout Landing edition of the New York Times game called Connections, in which you try to group 16 words into four groups of four that share a similarity. Here are the directions from the creators:
Find groups of four items that share something in common.
– Select four items and tap ‘Submit’ to check if your guess is correct.
– Find the groups without making 4 mistakes!
Category Examples
– FISH: Bass, Flounder, Salmon, Trout
– FIRE _____: Ant, Drill, Island, Opal
Categories will always be more specific than “5-LETTER-WORDS,” “NAMES” or “VERBS.”
Each puzzle has exactly one solution. Watch out for words that seem to belong to multiple categories!
Each group is assigned a color, which will be revealed as you solve: Yellow is the most straightforward, then green, then blue, and purple is the trickiest. You don’t have to guess in that order.
Here’s the link to today’s puzzle from the New York Times, if you want to play a round to try to get the hang of how the game works.
And here is the link to the version I made for your recap today. It’s on an interactive site, and the main difference between that site and the NYT version is that this version will not cut you off after four wrong guesses. You can continue guessing forever. So if you give up, come back here for the answers. And if you want, I’ve embedded the analog version below as a static image, though you won’t know if you have a group right, thus helping you get the other groups by having eliminated four words. Here’s the link to the interactive one again. Use the interactive one.
And here, after several lines of periods to hide it from view, are the answers and your recap.
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Globe Life Field has been a house of horrors for the Mariners this year, and I’m not just talking about the bad camera angles, the lack of anything to do around the stadium other than a Subway, the AI mid-inning entertainment, the Home Depot aesthetic . . . sorry, I got lost in a digression. The Mariners had lost all five games at the Rangers’ ballpark this season, scoring a total of just seven runs across those five games. The Mariners’ performance in Arlington alone basically accounts for the trouble the team is in right now, entering the game in third place and 2.5 games behind the Rangers, despite having a far superior run differential over both them and the Astros while also getting unlucky and underperforming. So having lost the first two games of this crucial series, this was a game that had higher stakes than you’d have expected. Seattle really needed to win.
The green category tees up the two Hatters, Stetson alumni Logan Gilbert and Jacob deGrom, who faced off for the third time this year. The Rangers won both Round 1 and Round 2, even though Gilbert pitched a touch better both times, in my view. Today, Gilbert pitched a touch better yet again.
It didn’t start great, with deGrom shutting the top of the Mariners’ lineup down on six pitches and Gilbert then giving up a quick run. But in deGrom’s half of the inning, both Cole Young and Dominic Canzone registered hard-hit balls. As for Gilbert, while Joc Pederson’s leadoff double was legit, Wyatt Langford’s single that moved him to third was on a pretty good pitch, and Pederson scored on a lame sac fly before Gilbert got out of the inning on a 58-mph ground ball and a strikeout.
It was a theme that would carry through the starters’ outings.
The Rangers scored two more runs in the fourth, despite never topping a 90-mph exit velocity. The dumbest part of that sequence was when a ball ricocheted off Gilbert’s foot, but don’t sleep on the seeing-eye single that Cole Young corralled, but couldn’t quite flip to second in time given how slowly the ball was moving.
But Gilbert was good, sitting 97 with his fastball and with his slider working for enough outings in a row to call it a trend. No wonder its usage was back up to the one-third mark he’s used when he’s been at his best. The Rangers just managed to cluster all their offense together, while Gilbert retired 17 in a row at one point and 10 in a row at another.
Meanwhile, the Mariners were touching deGrom up, recording 10 hard-hit balls, including the only barrel either starter would give up, a Cole Young triple struck at 102, somehow slower than his 103-mph lineout in the first. Young scored on a Julio Rodríguez single. But other than that, they were getting BABIPed to death, with several at ‘em balls.
Facing the lineup for the third time and sitting on 86 pitches, deGrom was vulnerable heading into the sixth. The Mariners half-completed the assignment, with base hits from Canzone and Randy Arozarena, but deGrom was pulled for a lefty. Josh Naylor smashed one at 104, but right to the second baseman. Then, Cal Raleigh absolutely let it rip, giving his A-swing to three fastballs that he couldn’t get close to, and Weston Wilson pinch-hit for Luke Raley and watched two pitches sail right down Broadway before whiffing at a pitch up out of the zone.
So, yeah, not a great outing from Cal Raleigh. Yet again. Despite the team and the region going all-in on Cal as the face of the franchise, he’s put up just 0.4 fWAR this year. What should be the heart of the team, Cal, Julio, and Naylor, have combined for a 95 wRC+ and 2.8 fWAR, when their pre-season projections should have had them at about 128 and 10.2 at this point in the season.
But the Mariners have stayed afloat thanks in no small part to the emergence of Young and Canzone.
Coming into the seventh inning, Young had been robbed of a base hit in the first and a double in the fifth to go with the triple he actually got in the third. When he came up with Colt Emerson on in the seventh, he hit the ball at 108.5 mph, his third time in triple digits on the day. This one got through, an opposite field hit to put two on for Canzone.
Canzone, who won the Sun Hat Award on Friday, laid off two uncompetitive pitches from Cole Winn before taking a splitter at the bottom of the zone for a ride. His swing came through at 84 mph, a top ~5% figure among all competitive swings in MLB this year. The ball left at 111, seemingly just to outdo Young. It was a no doubter, and the understatement of Canzone’s bat drop was the ice cold move in the Texas heat.
Randy, the member of this offense’s heart and soul that has lived up to his potential this season, then made it back-to-back home runs to get the score to 5-3.
Now working with the lead, Gabe Speier was dominant. Having been brought in for the last out of the sixth, he pitched the full seventh too, retiring all four batters he faced with three strikeouts. Some people have said Gabe’s strikeouts are on the way back. Big day for those people.
Eduard Bazardo had a harder time in the eighth, giving up a solo shot to bring the score back within one. But we should not be worried. He looks fine. He’s just had a random cluster of bad outcomes at a time when the team is glaringly on the struggle bus, so it feels worse. And in any event, Canzone got that run right back in the ninth, driving in Julio on a double down the left-field line.
The letter Y is a tricky little fellow, most famously associated with the word “sometimes.” That’s how it’s felt for Mariners’ closer Andrés Muñoz this season. A lockdown reliever for most of his career, he had a few blow-ups and a few close calls in the first half. But he’s turned that right around over his last eight innings. Twice, he was a pitch away from an immaculate inning. His velo’s back into triple digits. And this afternoon, he blew the doors off the Rangers with three ugly-looking strikeouts. For working his way back to his dominant form, and locking down a win the team really needed, Muñoz wins today’s Sun Hat Award.
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