Snide question to one issuing a challenge / TUE 7-13-21 / Pseudonym of the essayist Charles Lamb / Outburst in a nursery

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Easy, mostly

THEME: baseball idioms — that's all:

Theme answers:

• COVER ALL THE BASES (18A: Address every aspect of something)
• RIGHT OFF THE BAT (28A: Immediately)
• OUT OF LEFT FIELD (44A: Oddly and unexpectedly)
• WHOLE NEW BALLGAME (57A: Situation that starts things completely over)

Word of the Day: "Take the A-TRAIN" (32D: Transportation in a Duke Ellington tune) —

"Take the 'A' Train" is a jazz standard by Billy Strayhorn that was the signature tune of the Duke Ellington orchestra. // The use of the Strayhorn composition as the signature tune was made necessary by a ruling in 1940 by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). When ASCAP raised its licensing fees for broadcast use, many ASCAP members, including Ellington, could no longer play their compositions over radio, as most music was played live on radio at the time. Ellington turned to Billy Strayhorn and son Mercer Ellington, who were registered with ASCAP competitor BMI to "write a whole new book for the band," Mercer recalled. "'A' Train" was one of many tunes written by Strayhorn, and was picked to replace "Sepia Panorama" as the band's signature song. Mercer recalled that he found the composition in a trash can after Strayhorn discarded a draft of it because it sounded too much like a Fletcher Henderson arrangement. The song was first recorded on January 15, 1941 as a standard transcription for radio broadcast. The first (and most famous) commercial recording was made on February 15, 1941. // The title refers to the then-new A subway service that runs through New York City, going at that time from eastern Brooklyn, on the Fulton Street Line opened in 1936, up into Harlem and northern Manhattan, using the Eighth Avenue Line in Manhattan opened in 1932. // "Take the 'A' Train" was composed in 1939, after Ellington offered Strayhorn a job in his organization and gave him money to travel from Pittsburgh to New York City. Ellington wrote directions for Strayhorn to get to his house by subway, directions that began, "Take the A Train". (wikipedia) 

• • •

Tonight is the MLB All-Star Game, which I assume is the reason for running this puzzle today, this puzzle which obviously should've run yesterday by any normal crossword standard of judgment (this puzzle being far easier than yesterday's puzzle, which was clearly not a Monday). I'm all for timeliness, generally, but I just don't think this particular timeliness matters, especially since the connections to the All-Star Game specifically are so weak. It's Just Baseball-Related Idioms. There's nothing else to this. It's the most basic thing in the world. This could've run twenty or thirty or forty years ago no problem. In fact, I'd be very surprised if something very much if not exactly like it hadn't run somewhere before. There's just not much to it, and it doesn't particularly scream All-Star Game, so run it on Monday. I mean, if timeliness really means that much to you, just run it on Monday and say it was timed to coincide with the Home-Run Derby, which was yesterday (congratulations, by the way, to the Mets' Pete Alonso, who won it for the second consecutive time). HIT OUT OF THE PARK (15!). See, that wasn't hard. Now go back in time, rewrite the puzzle, and run it tomorrow. 

The fill on this was disappointingly olden and stale. ENYA ELIA ELISE EWW EWE EWERS I could go on (and on) but I'll spare you. The one place it gets slightly interesting is also the only place the grid gets a little rough, difficulty-wise. That place is "WHO, YOU?" This is probably the most original thing in the grid, which is good, but it's also an answer born out of desperation, a desperation created by a basic architectural decision—that is, the decision to position your themers (the first answers that go into the grid) in such a way that one of your crosses ends up with the letter pattern -H---U. There is almost nothing you can do with that letter pattern. The terminal "U" alone really limits your options, and that "H" narrows them down much further. So you get inventive and go with "WHO, YOU?" But now your puzzle gets a little harder, because "WHO, YOU?" is actually hard to clue in a very easy fashion, and then ADROIT is crosses it and adds another little layer of difficulty, and then you clue RACK in a way that's somewhat less than straightforward, and all of a sudden you've got an anomalously thorny section, which isn't a problem, actually. Again, it kind of makes the puzzle interesting, and adds needed difficulty (the rest of it being transparent and bland). But then you drop the ball completely by needlessly dragging Tonto-speak into the picture!? This may be the only time I say this, but I'd rather see a prefix (HEMO-) (just change RACK to RASH) (and there are undoubtedly much better solutions). Even if you (somehow) don't think the portrayal of Tonto has historically been super-racist, white people have jokily used movie-Indian / Tonto-speak (including especially KEMO Sabe) to caricature Native American people for a long time. It's not like KEMO is good fill. It's got a complicated, confused, controversial history. No one's life is enriched by it, no grid is made better. Just Avoid It. 

Five things:

• EWW (58D: "That's disgusting!") — my god the fill is bad down there. It's almost performance-art bad. EWW next to its Bizarro twin WEE, which crosses the WEE in SWEET, while EWW crosses EWER, all while a long CBER (ugh) looks on. Zero effort to polish the grid there. Astonishing complacency.
• FACILE (31D: Effortless) — I only ever heard FACILE in the sense of "overly simplistic" (as an argument), so I needed a bunch of crosses here.
• BEFALLEN (40D: Happened to, poetically) — LOL "poetically." It's just a word. I had no idea it was particularly "poetic." I guess it's a little *dramatic*, but it's not like EBON or 'NEATH or something. It's Just A Word.
• MIT (8D: Prestigious sch. in metro Boston) — 10,000 "ughs" to "prestigious," please stop. So many better ways to clue a major university than by its stupid prestige factor.
• NUTSO (66A: Cockamamie) — this is twice in two days that I've run into the NUTTY / NUTSO dilemma. I don't think I thought of it as a standard xword dilemma before, but I do now. Reasonably common short fill, no way to decide one way or the other without crosses. Like ATON v ALOT—answer remains ambiguous even after you've gotten a couple of the crosses. Classic cruddy crossword(ese) dilemma.  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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