Right off the bat, I acknowledge I’ve broken a couple of cardinal rules of crosswords:

1. This is a themeless grid with more than 72 words
2. The central segment is cut off from the rest of the grid

Here’s the backstory:

Isaac Aronow opened yesterday’s (11 May) New York Times Gameplay email with this:

As long as I have been solving crossword puzzles, there has been debate over the inclusion of certain types of trivia. Anecdotally, it has always felt to me as though trivia is the thing that will rile people up the most. Something that’s obvious to one solver might be totally opaque to the next. For every person out there shaking a fist at Bebe Rebozo’s being in the puzzle, there is another cursing the inclusion of Lady Gaga.

I would say the category of trivia-related complaint that finds itself in my inbox most often is probably baseball.

He went on to note that, in August of 2025, Jack Dreyer, a rookie pitcher with the LA Dodgers, had created a crossword puzzle that was written about on MLB.com. I loved the look of the grid! (And I assume that the central segment was meant to represent a baseball). It had a total of 80 words, along with a couple of unchecked squares; I got rid of those, dropping the word count to 76, and just had some fun filling the grid. I especially like the 6 longest entries and their clues.

This won’t be the most challenging solve, but I hope it’s still an enjoyable one. I’ll follow themeless conventions in my next grid!