Bernard Malamud novel about baseball phenom / MON 3-16-20 / Darth Vader's name as boy / Triple Crown winner of 1977 / Highway nearly 1400 mile route that runs through Whitehorse Yukon Territory

Constructor: Gary Cee

Relative difficulty: Easy (2:37)

THEME:"IT MEANS A LOT TO ME" (39A: "I'm deeply indebted" ... or a hint to the ends of 17-, 25-, 51- and 64-Across) — last words in theme phrases can each mean "a lot":

Theme answers:

• SCRAP HEAP (17A: Junk pile)
• SEATTLE SLEW (25A: Triple Crown winner of 1977)
• BATTERY PACK (51A: Power source for an electric vehicle)
• PAPAL MASS (64A: Easter event in Vatican city)

Word of the Day: MMA (37D: Sport also known as cage fighting, in brief) —

Mixed martial arts (MMA), also known as cage fighting, (my emphasis) is a full-contact combat sport that allows striking and grappling, both standing and on the ground, using techniques from various combat sports and martial arts. The first documented use of the term mixed martial arts was in a review of UFC 1 by television critic Howard Rosenbergin 1993. The term gained popularity when newfullcontact.com, then one of the largest websites covering the sport, hosted and republished the article. The question of who actually coined the term is subject to debate. (wikipedia)(stop lifting your cluing language directly from wikipedia, please, everybody, thank you)

I solved this so fast that I was only dimly aware of the theme revealer. I got "IT MEANS LOT TO ME" just from the initial part of the clue, not bothering to stop and think about how it related to everything else. Finished in near-record time, and at that point all I could say about the puzzle was that a. it was easy, and b. nothing seemed *particularly* horrible about it. Looking back at the theme, I think it works just fine. I think it's a fairly ordinary but totally acceptable Monday-type theme. Last Words- or First Words-type themes are Monday and Tuesday bread & butter. HEAP, SLEW, PACK, and MASS all do, in fact, mean a lot, so ... good. My only complaint with the theme is that HEAP isn't sufficiently redirected by the theme. That is, PACK means something totally different from "lot" in its answer, and same with MASS, but SCRAP HEAP is a HEAP ... of SCRAP. HEAP doesn't get a new meaning there, not really. Every themer should really incorporate word redirection, or redefinition, or whatever you want to call it. If all the last words share a common meaning, that should *NOT* be the meaning they have in their respective answers, is what I am trying in my own inimitable bumbling fashion to say. I don't know if SEATTLE SLEW follows or doesn't follow redirection protocol, as I don't know what "SLEW" is supposed to mean in the name SEATTLE SLEW. The word doesn't have a clear grammatical function. There are lots of other words that might have been used in this theme (LOAD, PILE, TON, BUNCH, HOST, OCEAN .... etc.?), so maybe it's not the tightest theme ever, but again, themewise, I think it holds up OK and I don't have any serious complaints.


The fill, however, upon reflection, is pretty weak. It's very old-fashioned, very crosswordese-reliant, filled with stuff that constant solvers (esp. folks who have been solving since the last century) will be readily familiar with, but that's really quite stale. There's no reason not to work harder to polish / modernize a small corner with ALCAN (?) crossing TARSI and ANI, no reason an easy puzzle like this should be teeming with low-rent fill like ESSEN YESNO ETAT ECRU ETAL ALA AGITA STENS (!) PIS ERR AHEM ASHE ERIN WAH. No one of these is so so bad, but taken together, they really clog the system. Six (!) longer Downs should add some color, but ... they don't. Not really. I enjoyed seeing "THE NATURAL," but besides the theme answers, it was the only thing I truly enjoyed seeing. So it's a mixed bag today. Workmanlike but passable theme, workmanlike but passable fill. I'm not mad. I'm not happy. The end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]