The latest craze hitting the world is Sudoku, the American game of putting the digits 1-9 into a 9x9 grid separated into nine 3x3 sections such that each row, column, and section contains exactly one of the digits from 1-9. Sudoku puzzles appear in the paper each day, and there are many web sites with puzzles on them. There are many variations on the Sudoku theme, including overlapping puzzles, Sodoko (certain 9-patterns must have 1-9 as well), the Monster (certain sums have to add up), and so forth.
A rather unusual application appeared recently on the Web, although I had thought of it months ago. Nine is the number of cells in a row or column in Sudoku, but 9 is also the number of members of a baseball team. So how about a baseball sudoku? The one I had thought of was to replace the numbers (which really aren't numbers; adding 2 to 4 to get 6 in a puzzle does not make sense) with baseball positions. Certain cells are filled with positions, such as c (catcher), 1b (first baseman), cf (center fielder) and so forth. The idea is to fill in the rest so that each row, column, and block constitutes an entire baseball team. Big deal. This is just ordinary Sudoku with baseball positions in it.
As any baseball fan knows, many players can play several positions. For example, a center fielder can play right field, a shortstop can play second base and so forth. So the idea is to provide as clues not positions, but real major league players, some of whom can play more than one position. The idea is to fill in the remaining squares with real players and designate the positions of each of these players so that each row, column, and block contains a complete baseball team. This is equivalent to a variation of Sudoku where the clues are choices of numbers, saying this square is either a 3 or a 5. A variation on this would be to make it so some special rows, columns, or blocks are from the same team, so that it's conceivable that this team of players could actually be fielded in a real baseball game.
So if you are going to do baseball sudoku, do it right. Don't just make it plain old Sudoku with baseball labels. Get some baseball into it, too. And by the way, make sure you use only National League players. If you use American League players, that injects a tenth position into the puzzle - the designated hitter. You no longer then have the nice 9x9 square, if 10 positions have to be filled.
