Major League Baseball (MLB) World Series
About the Series - The Puzzles
This is a series of 31 simple (really!) puzzles based on the baseball league in the United States. There is a cache for each of the 30 teams and a bonus. The bonus can be collected by finding letters of a keyword in some of the caches. Each "clue" is duplicated (in 2 caches) so that the bonus can be found even if you have some DNFs (unless you are really unlucky).
See MLB World Series - BONUS
The puzzle has the same questions for each team (of course the answers are different). I suggest this Wikipedia reference should you not have the answers memorised! The questions are:
- How many World Series has this team played in? (AB)
- How many World Series has this team played won? (CD)
- The last 2 digits of the year this team was established (EF).
For the first 2 questions, if the answer is < 10, use a leading zero. For example, if a team played in 5 World Series, then A=0 and B=5.
For the last question, use the year that the team was first established as a major league team. For many, this may have been a different team name and even a different city than today. Clicking on the teams on the reference page I suggested will provide you with this information. See the image below, you want the "Established in" year. (This is a general example - #1 isn't about the Dodgers). In this example, you want the year I blanked out (in the yellow box), not 1958.
The values of ABCD will change each year for the two teams in the World Series. I will endeavor to update the puzzle each year when the World Series ends (generally at the end of October or early November), and will post a note when I have done so.
There are also rumours of an MLB expansion (to 32 teams). If that happens I'll need to find places for 2 more caches!
About the Series - The Route and Caches
It is my intent that the caches should be straightforward to find. The series largely reuses the area of Madrab's excellent "Brooks and Hills" series. My thanks to him for letting me reuse this playing field (and helping me hide them). There are some hills. There are also a couple of spurs that involve a little backtracking - the original series had 22 caches, and I needed more for this, and a circular extension wasn't always possible.
Why is this numbered #1, and the others aren't numbered?
Initially, I numbered them all. But it isn't a simple loop, and I kept changing my mind about what the best route is. So I decided to leave the route planning to the finder. I left this one named #1 as this is the obvious place to start.. It is for you to decide the route you want to take.
This does add to the difficulty of completing the series. I have factored this into the rating of the Bonus.
Please note: Because of the size of the container and places to hide it, the bonus isn't as near the start/end as I would have liked. And whilst I leave the route to your own planning, I have posted the approximate coordinates as a waypoint. I suggest doing the "circuit" in as much of a counter-clockwise direction as you can, which means by the time you reach here you should have enough information to get the final coordinates.
How long is it?
As I set it in 2 sessions I'm not exactly sure, but I would estimate around 10 miles. The original "Brooks and Hills" route was around 7 miles, and this adds 8 additional caches. It will also depend on the route you choose. I would be interested to hear what your trackers log the distance as.
About the Series - Brief History of the League
Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization. One of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada, MLB comprises 30 teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), with 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada. Formed in 1876 and 1901, respectively, the NL and AL cemented their cooperation with the National Agreement in 1903, making MLB the oldest major professional sports league in the world. They remained legally separate entities until 2000, when they merged into a single organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball.
The "World Series" - which isn't a World Cup, but simply a (misleading) name - started in 1903, and is played between the winner of the American League and the winner of the National League. Until 1997, the World Series was the only time when an AL team played an NL team. Since then, there has been an increasing number of games between the two leagues as part of the 162-game "regular season".
It is outside the scope of this series, but there does exist a "Baseball World Cup" of sorts. The current competition is called the "World Baseball Classic" and is held every 4 years. The 2023 World Baseball Classic Championship was won by Japan. The Great Britain national baseball team qualified for the 20-team tournament and went 1-3 in the group stage.
This cache - Arizona Diamondbacks
The Arizona Diamondbacks are one of the newest teams, joining in the most recent expansion. They play in Chase Field, formerly Bank One Ballpark, a retractable roof stadium in Downtown Phoenix, Arizona. In their short history, their most famous player is Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson.
The cache can be found at N 51 25.A(B+B)D W 002 15.(F-B-D)BE
3 November 2023: Formula updated to include the 2023 season. The final coordinates are unchanged.
