MLB Connections

MLB Connections draws its links from baseball careers and names: debut clubs, teams, eras and shared surnames. This board has no jersey-number groups. Some puzzles use the hand a player threw with or bring four switch hitters together, so a familiar name can fit for a reason that has nothing to do with his most famous team.

Never. One board is one league, so a set is four major-league players and the fact they share comes from the baseball record alone — no two-sport athletes, no borrowing a name from the football or basketball rotation to complete a group. Those leagues have boards of their own, running the same day.

Two ways that look alike and are not: the teams a player appeared for at any point, and the club he debuted with. Careers in this sport are long and well travelled, so a name can honestly belong to several franchises while belonging to exactly one debut.

Round career totals that the record book itself treats as thresholds — a count of stolen bases, of home runs, of strikeouts — and the voted awards by their proper names, the rookie honour among them. Every member has cleared the same bar or won the same thing, so the group is checkable to the season rather than argued about, and because these have been awarded for well over a century an award group ranges across eras more widely than almost anything else on this board.

It is, as a plain matter of record: four men who are in it. The category reads as a greatness question and is not one — the vote already happened, so all the board is asking is whether you know how it went. It is one of the few groups here where half-recognising a name is genuinely a clue rather than a trap.

Occasionally, and they are the ones people remember: four surnames that are also car makers, or occupations, or animals. The names have nothing else in common — not a team, not a decade — which is exactly why the group hides until the other three are gone.

Ten more: the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, college basketball, golf, the WNBA, college football, soccer, cricket and the AFL. More MLB games: MLB Wordle, MLB Grid, Build an MLB Player, MLB Career Simulator and MLB Team Wheel. MLB Trivia Quiz asks three questions a day. Guess the MLB Team asks for the city of one era’s players. The MLB Ball Knowledge Dive asks for one right name, and the less obvious it is, the more it scores.