Cry in Cologne / MON 6-12-23 / Buck first Black coach in Major League Baseball / 2017 Disney movie about the Day of the Dead / Tech for connecting wireless speakers / Filter for nostalgic photos / North America's only marsupial

Constructor: Alice Liang

Relative difficulty: No idea (from a Downs-only perspective, very hard)

THEME: WORD OF MOUTH (60A: What rumors are spread by ... or a hint to the ends of 16-, 29-, 35-/37- and 45-Across) — theme answers end with parts of the mouth:

Theme answers:

• HITS THE ROOF (16A: Explodes in anger)
• BLUETOOTH (29A: Tech for connecting wireless speakers)
• MOTHER / TONGUE (35A: With 37-Across, native language)
• BUBBLEGUM (45A: Chew on this!)

Word of the Day: Buck O'NEIL (28D: Buck ___, first Black coach in Major League Baseball) —

John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil Jr. (November 13, 1911 – October 6, 2006) was a first baseman and manager in the Negro American League, mostly with the Kansas City Monarchs. After his playing days, he worked as a scout and became the first African American coach in Major League Baseball. In his later years he became a popular and renowned speaker and interview subject, helping to renew widespread interest in the Negro leagues, and played a major role in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022 as an executive.

O'Neil's life was documented in Joe Posnanski's 2007 book The Soul of Baseball. (wikipedia)

• • •

This seems too remedial a concept, somehow. They're just ... mouth parts? Why these parts? Why, generally? It's just a group of things that have something, vaguely, in common. And the revealer doesn't really bring it all together well. WORD OF MOUTH is meant to be taken as "word ... related to the mouth"? Do I have that right? The TONGUE in MOTHER/TONGUE is bad in two respects, first because it's way way way too close to the actual tongue in your mouth (note how "roof" "tooth" and "gum" all appear in decidedly non-mouth contexts, whereas here "tongue" = language, an extension of the anatomical tongue to the activity it performs). The other way the central themer falls short is in being split. Something about isolating the "mouth" part like that (i.e. cutting "tongue" off and having it sit there on its own) feels awkward, out of keeping with the other answers, where the "mouth" parts are all run together, attached. Better for this to be 16 wide with MOTHERTONGUE sitting in the middle. I realize this is purely an aesthetic judgment, but I don't like TONGUE hanging out there all on its own. Severed TONGUE. No good. But mainly this theme suffers from being blah. A generic and unambitious concept. Execution-wise, everything seems OK. The fill is maybe a little weaker / crosswordesier than you'd like an easy Monday to be (ACH ORA AMNIOS URAL PCS CIO OOH AHS AOL ATRIA IMAM AIME etc.), but the puzzle is a bit theme-dense, so maybe that put some strain on the grid. This makes the iffier fill understandable, at least.

This was the hardest Downs-only solve I've had this year. In particular, those 3x6 NE and SW corners were brutal, in that two of the three Downs in each instance were ???? This is mostly because three of those four were colloquial expressions—fun to see in the grid, but notoriously hard to get without some hint from crosses. I had "___ IT!" at 11D: "Relax!" and wanted "COOL IT!" but was not at all sure, and when you put that lack of certainty alongside 12D: "Unbelievable!"—about which I was Not At All sure—well, you've got stuckness. PC- and OO- looked really unpromising, but eventually I just committed to "COOL IT!" and eventually "___ESH!" turned itself into "YEESH!" I feel like "YEESH" can mean millions of things, with lots of nuances depending on context, so getting there was hard. Not as hard, though, as getting the SW corner, where I nearly died, for real. The problem? Well, partly it was BARTER, which had the vague [Trade] clue (solely because the puzzle thought, wrongly, once again, that doubling up clues would be fun! (see 56D: Trade (SWAP))). But the much bigger problem was "BE-" at 45D: "Stop acting up!" ("BEHAVE!"). Again, the problem was one of context, i.e. imagining the right one. Couldn't figure out what kind of "acting up" we were talking about. The only answers I was considering there, for the longest time, where two-word answers: "BE COOL!" (impossible, as COOL was already in the grid, which I realized ... eventually) and "BE NICE!" I wanted BARTER to work but couldn't make it happen with the "BE-" answers I was entertaining. Eventually had to run the alphabet at -ORAS to see which letter seemed most plausible. Nearly went right past HORAS. First reaction: "meaningless." Then: "Whoa whoa, wait ... a dance plural? ... OMG it's 'BEHAVE!' ["Stop acting up!"] is 'BEHAVE'." And the "Congratulations" message appeared! Along the way, both POT ROAST and "GO FIGURE!" took a lot of work to uncover, but it was those NE/SW corners that really knocked me around today.

Not much else to say. Conceptually, this one didn't seem original or ambitious enough, and the revealer just didn't snap. The themers themselves are mostly interesting answers, and "GO FIGURE!"  adds some more colloquial spice to the mix. Mostly I'm really digging COOWN, just because of how strange it looks in the grid, with no hyphen or anything (21D: Possess jointly). Looks like a typo for CROWN or CLOWN. I'm pronouncing it "COWN" in my head, only with the vowel drawn waaaay out, like you're a lowing ... well, cow, I suppose. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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