The New York Times published the Sports Edition of its Connections word puzzle for October 5, 2026 — puzzle No. 742, built in association with The Athletic. This one asks solvers to sort 16 words into four groups of four, with the usual four-mistake leash before the board locks up.
As always, the solution set is out there for anyone who'd rather skip the grid.
What's on the board
The four categories this time: Game with no Stakes, Types of Tennis Courts, Tampa Bay Rays, and ___Run.
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The first group is DEAD RUBBER, EXHIBITION, FRIENDLY and SCRIMMAGE — four ways of describing a match that doesn't count. The tennis court set is CARPET, CLAY, GRASS and HARD, which is about as straightforward as this puzzle gets. The Rays group pulls four surnames: BAKER, CAMINERO, JAX and WALLS. And the last category fills in the blank with EARNED, HOME, INSURANCE and STRETCH, all of which precede the same four-letter word.
Nothing tricky in the mechanics, but the mix is odd — you're jumping from cricket and soccer vocabulary to surfacing materials to a specific MLB roster in the space of one grid.
The Rays round, and why it's there
Four Tampa Bay players as a single category is the kind of thing the Sports Edition does when a team's roster happens to hand the puzzle a clean set of four. Baker, Caminero, Jax and Walls fit the format. That's it. No deeper meaning, whatever you might read into the timing.
How the game works
Connections runs on a fixed format: 16 words, four categories, four words each. You get four wrong guesses per puzzle before it's over. The Sports Edition is available on web browsers and mobile devices, same as the main edition, and it ships daily.
The four-mistake cap is what separates it from a straight trivia quiz. You can afford one bad grouping, maybe two if you're careful — but the moment you burn a guess on a plausible-sounding category that isn't real, the board starts working against you. Today's trap is likely the ___Run group, since EARNED, HOME and INSURANCE all read as baseball terms on their own, which means anyone in a baseball mindset might try to jam them into the Rays category first.
Where this sits
Puzzle No. 742 puts the Sports Edition somewhere past its two-year mark, and the format hasn't shifted. Same grid, same rules, same four categories, every day.
The next one lands tomorrow morning.
