Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Off-Day Puzzle #3: Solution

The answer to yesterday's puzzle is Ramon Ortiz. The seven clues were basically a coded internet scavenger hunt, with the initials of the answers spelling out the clue to the correct Ortiz.

#1 [binary]

First name of the former Dodgers player [EDWIN (Jackson)] who was the answer to the SoSG PCS puzzle posted on the day after [6/23/09] a current Dodgers player [Manny Ramirez] hit a grand slam on the same night [6/22/09] his bobblehead was given away at Dodger Stadium.

#2 [upside-down text]

First name of the player [XAVIER (Paul)] drafted by the Dodgers in the same round [fourth of 2004] as the player [Jonathan Papelbon] who pitched the final out of the World Series in the year [2007] that saw the DVD release of the movie whose title ["300"] contains the number of career home runs by the winner [Chuck Klein] of the National League Most Valuable Player award in the year [1932] that Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped.

#3 [tiny text]

First name [A.J. (Ellis)] of the current Dodgers player whose uniform number [17] is thirteen more than the number of runs [4] scored on the date of death [6/5/04] of the President of the United States [Ronald Reagan] born in Tampico, IL, by the AL West team from the city [Seattle] which hosted the World's Fair in the year [1909] that saw the inaugural edition of the championship event [Grey Cup] most recently won by the Montreal Alouettes.

#4 [Morse code]

Last name of the former Dodgers player [NEWCOMBE (Don)] named the Cy Young winner in the year of death [1956] of the painter [Jackson Pollock] who created a work that shares a title ["She-Wolf"] with the 2009 album released by the artist [Shakira] who won the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year in the year [2006] that Sons of Steve Garvey was founded.

#5 [backwards text]

First name of the current Dodgers player [GARRET (Anderson)] who was born [6/30/72] exactly six years after [6/30/66] the professional athlete [Mike Tyson] who appeared in the hit 2009 movie ["The Hangover"] which also featured the performer [Heather Graham] whose IMDb page link is http://www.imdb.com/name/nm000xxxx/, where xxxx [1287*] is equal to three times the number [429] of the 1961 Topps non-All Star baseball card of the player [Al Kaline] who won the Roberto Clemente Award in the only year [1973] in which the Dodgers' regular-season record was 95-66.

#6 [invisible text]

Last name of the current Dodgers player [ETHIER (Andre)] whose home run total [13] in the year of death [2007] of the first wife [Jane Wyman] of the elected official referenced in clue #3 [Reagan] is equal to the number of the Shakespearean sonnet [13] which contains the seventh word ["unthrifts"**] in the title of the book referenced at http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/yyyy, where yyyy [3203] is equal to two thousand more than three times the number [401] used as the area code for the birth state [Rhode Island] of the former player [Davey Lopes] who managed the 2001 Milwaukee Brewers.

#7 [Pig Latin]

First name of the former player [LARRY (Bowa)] who, in the same year referenced at the end of clue #6 [2001], was managing the NL East team from the city [Philadelphia] with the same number of letters in its name as total home runs hit [12] in the latest Chinese Year of the Rat [2008] by the player [Jeff Kent] who hit the first home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the celebrated 2006 [9/18/06] Dodgers victory in which the team hit four consecutive home runs.

*Pretty funny who you get if you accidentally use Kaline's All-Star card from that year's set.
**Not "unthrift" (Sonnet #9) or "unthrifty" (Sonnet #4).

Edwin
Xavier
A.J.
Newcombe
Garret
Ethier
Larry

First initials spell out...EXANGEL. As stated at the beginning of the puzzle, the answer is either Russ or Ramon Ortiz. Ramon Ortiz is the ex-Angel. Ta-da!

Congrats to a whopping 25 solvers: ubragg, Mr. Customer, LLCoolL, QuadSevens, J. Steve, Steve Dittmore, Greg Finley, Keven C, Matt, Lauro, Josh S., Wicks, Dunkhawk, Dusty Baker, berkowit28, Jason, Golem, drewdez, Loney Fan, Bryan, MR. F, Nicholas, Dusto_Magnifico, Mr LA Sports Fan and Curious Gene.

Look for our next puzzle on Monday, May 3 at 7 a.m. PT, from none other than reader Josh S.!

27 comments:

QuadSevens said...

Had to do one last scavenger hunt to find out who you get if you use Al Kaline's 1961 Topps All-Star card. THE JUICE!!!

Josh S. said...

*prays he's done in time*

berkowit28 said...

One of the trickier and, it turns out, unnecessary things was digging out the actual first name of A.J. Ellis, just in case we were going to need last letters or whatever. ("A.J." is not in fact a name.) It's Andrew. You never know - this could be a clue for an off-day puzzle in 2013, so store it away.

Some other things that took a bit of fishing around was 1) to see which 2009 movie featuring someone called Heather Graham was a "hit" movie (I never heard of "The Hangover", among her other notable 2009 hits) - fortunately the professional athlete's name was recognizable, and 2) which of the many, many movies *containing* "300" in its title had the right DVD release year to lead to a solution - fortunately the simplest one (the one whose title *consisted* of "300") worked.

I'm good with these logical puzzles. It's the ones that depend on lateral thinking (very exciting when you actually think of the right thing) that usually stump me.

LLCoolL said...

I actually had a hard time finding the Edwin Jackson puzzle from last year. I couldn't figure out what search terms to use. And finding the scores from 2004 was much harder than it should have been.

Kyle Baker said...

baseball-reference.com

Greatest website ever.

Nostradamus said...

Retrosheet also scores high marks.

Steve Sax said...

Q7 (or anyone), can you link to the Al Kaline card image?

Steve Sax said...

@berkowitz, you'd never heard of The Hangover? The highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all-time? (And the #1 comedy of alltime on DVD.)

Matt said...

I accidentally used Jimmie Foxx as the MVP, forgetting that Philly used to have two teams, or that Jimmie Foxx played in the AL. That lead me to 534 home runs, which lead me to "Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534" staring Eric Roberts. It spiraled a bit from there...

Steve K said...

Sax, here are the Al Kaline cards...

Regular #429 and All-Star #580

Steve K said...

Matt, did you get to Alton Pinkney like I did?

The movie came out in 2002, which is when Troy Percival pitched the final out of the Series. Alton Pinkney and Troy Percival were drafted in the same round.

Matt said...

No, that direct to DVD gem came out in 2004, so I ended up with C.J. Ankrum....he was drafted the same round as Keith Foulke.

The "C" is for Christian so I guessed that Christian was being used as "X", like X-mas.

berkowit28 said...

Nope, missed The Hangover. Highest-grossing comedy of all time, eh? I tend not to use Business section high scores as substitutes for reviews, but I guess I missed those. I'll look them up. I'll look out for it on TV next year if they don't convince me it's worth the big bucks for DVD purchase.

QuadSevens said...

I used google to start all my searches. Google led me to baseball reference and wikipedia a couple times. Both were very useful.

MR.F said...

I don't watch much TV but I hear about most of the major movie releases from commercials and stuff on baseball games. I wonder, berkowit, do you avoid watching commercials?

MR.F said...

LLCoolL, I just browse SoSG by month. It's kinda hard to find all the posts by day (since there's so freaking many and only the first post of the day has an actual date on), but it's harder to miss stuff that way.

Steve K said...

Matt, I was using the same gem of a movie... It was apparently on TV in 2001 and on DVD in 2002. 2004 was the Finland release date. And it's available on Netflix!

Regardless, C.J. Ankrum seems to have turned out about as successful as Alton Pinkney!

Steve Sax said...

Okay, now I get the All-Star Kaline reference. Thanks.

Steve Sax said...

@Matt 10:15a: "That lead me to 534 home runs, which lead me to "Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534" staring Eric Roberts. It spiraled a bit from there..."

Rough air tends to cause spiralling, indeed. Sorry you had such a turbulent time!

LLCoolL said...

@Matt: 534? What are the odds? Actually, I wonder how many numbers below 1000 are NOT in a movie title. Certainly more than the number of people who have seen "Rough Air".

Matt said...

J. Steve,

I totally missed the Finland thing!

But speaking of Eric Roberts, has anyone seen Purgatory? It's a pretty good TV/Direct to DVD movie about all the famous western outlaws living clean lives in Purgatory before going to the great beyond.

ER plays the lead bad guy, Blackjack Britton...it's the basic I'm-not-doing-anything-this-Saturday-afternoon movie.

berkowit28 said...

Actually, I *do* avoid watching most commercials. Most of the time, I can't watch even a Dodgers game live from the beginning but get home an hour or two later. I DVR everything (which has its own pitfalls to look out for: I set baseball games to record 5 hours, just in case of extra innings, but for some reason setting "record all First-Time episodes on this channel" for FSN Prime Ticket, constantly resets it to the scheduled 3 hours, so I have to remember to keep fixing that almost daily). That has the advantage that when watching I can skip all commercials. Often I catch up during the course of a game.

I generally have great resistance to commercials even when they're on. I hate commercials, I hate that they're louder, noisier, brighter and crasser than programs, and I just blank them out, mute the TV, look away, etc. They backfire on me - I'll tend to avoid whatever is being advertised if the ad is crap, which most are.

When I lived in England, many of the commercials on ITV, the commercial network that has to compete with commercial-free BBC, were better than the programs. I miss that. Once in a blue moon, there's a commercial like that on, but never on sports networks. Then I watch.

MR.F said...

That's cool. I hate commercials, too, though I have a certain tolerance level. If I don't watch too much TV it doesn't bother me. If I'm watching a lot of TV, my patience wears thin.

berkowit28 said...

I've been checking up. The two periodicals I read regularly, where I'll see movie reviews, are the LA Times and the New Yorker magazine. I don't always read right through the Times, so I must have missed the Hangover review and references there. (Again, I tend just not to "see" ads. especially the huge movie ads that take up a full page. I just skip those.) I do always read the New Yorker reviews.

I'm checking the online archives. The New Yorker apparently never gave The Hangover a full review, which is unusual if it was considered a major release. But they do review just 2-3 movies per week. The little one-paragraph spot makes it sound OK, but not something I'd go out of my way for. The Times wants to charge me for the archived review, even though I'm a subscriber. I don't think much of that, so I may not follow through.

Steve K said...

Berko - Don't know if you have the same crappy DVR as I do, but on mine I can go under "Edit Series Recording," select "View all settings," and then change the end time every time the show records. Changing the settings just for the next airing only changes it for that one and not future airings.

berkowit28 said...

It doesn't sound exactly the same software, but, yes, I can change settings for the series. The trouble is that when a new instance shows up (the next 7 days show up at a time, so every day, or at least every day when there's a new game on PT a week later, there's a new instance) it seems to "correct" my settings to the scheduled 3 hours - and "corrects" *every* game in the series beginning with the very next game coming up, which is often that same day or night, so I have to keep on my toes. I won't swear this happens *every* time there's a new game 7 days hence, but it looks like it. It makes relying on pre-setting the series (all first-time "MLB Baseball" on PT) unreliable. For some reason, this doesn't appear to happen with KCAL, or at least not every time, so there's some factor I haven't figured out.

Steve K said...

Definitely not the same system. Sorry I couldn't help...