Sports Puzzle Secrets Revealed

The puzzle that pops up on The Athletic each day is a quick brain‑teaser about sports. It’s called Connections: Sports Edition, and it shows up only in The Athletic’s own app or on its website, not in the NYT Games app. Every puzzle gives you four groups of words that share a common theme, and the clues are split by color. The easiest ones are in yellow, while the hardest are purple. For today’s version, the yellow clues all point to parts of a baseball hit cycle: double, home run, single and triple.

The green set focuses on Houston teams, but you have to pick the singular form of each team’s nickname. The answers are Astro, Cougar, Rocket and Texan. The blue clues are names of former players from the U. S. women’s national soccer squad, and they turn out to be Foudy, Hamm, Lilly and Solo. The purple group is a bit trickier: each answer ends with the name of an MLB team in singular form. The solutions are comet (Met), international (National), stranger (Ranger) and stray (Ray). If you’re stuck, remember that the yellow clues are usually the simplest. Once you get those, the rest of the puzzle tends to fall into place.

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