Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Off-Day Puzzle #10: Solution

Here's the solution to yesterday's puzzle:

The remaining open squares spell "Leader in Career Grand Slams as a Dodger," who is Gil Hodges.

Congratulations to UBragg, BWrightson, Keven C, Loney Fan, Fanerman, Berkowit28, Quadsevens, Drewdez, Erin, and Jose. And thanks to Mr Customer for an awesome puzzle. And since he had to sit this one out, he's getting the average of his last 6 puzzles (although Puzzle #6 is factored down to 100 pts), which is 72. Updated rankings coming soon.

Also, prepare yourself for two puzzles next week, on the Monday and Wednesday surrounding the All-Star Game. And Wednesday is Puzzle #12, which means Grand Slam!

5 comments:

MR.F said...

The trickest part for me was figuring out that the yellow completely surrounded the orange.

Erin said...

I'll admit now that I sort of worked backwards. I got the yellow and orange, but I was struggling with the green, blue and indigo. So, since I already had "career leader in..." I just looked at the thing and tried to figure out what might spell. I got it, and turned in my answer, and then went back to figure out how the color paths went around those letters.

berkowit28 said...

I eventually realized that the orange had to take the far left option if red and violet were going to be able to squeeze in, and that in turn meant yellow would have to take the long route around the orange. I was surprised that even after figuring those paths out the "inner paths" of green,indigo, blue were still tricky, green especially.

This was a really good puzzle because it was so intricate, with so many wrong turns that invalidated previous attempts on other paths, that had to be worked out. I'm curious how Mr. Customer was able to ensure that there was only one solution that would work for the paths, with no other solution that left different free letters.

Was there a straightforward way of getting the Dodgers' grand slam career leaders? I couldn't get that out of baseball Reference. At Baseball Almanac, I found an all-time grand slam leaders board, and worked down manually from Manny and Eddie Murray, more GS's but next to none while with the Dodgers, to Gil Hodges and Mike Piazza tied all-time at 14, all of them for the Dodgers for Gill so he had to be leader. Was there an easier way?

Erin said...

Berk, I googled "most grand slams as a Dodger," and this page came up:

http://www.acmewebpages.com/dodgers/records.htm

jose said...

I did the same thing as Berko - still was only 90% sure it was Hodges at the end.