NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026 (#772)

Wednesday’s Connections: Sports Edition from The Athletic and New York Times (NYT) Games is puzzle #772, for Nov. 4, 2026. Hints for each group come first, then the answers in a spoiler section.

How the Sports Edition works

It is the sports version of Connections, built by The Athletic with New York Times Games. You sort 16 sports terms into four groups of four and can make four mistakes. It launched on Feb. 9, 2025, and new puzzles post at midnight local time, according to The Athletic’s announcement.

How a first-letter wordplay group works

Some groups hide a real sports term behind a tile that looks like an ordinary word. Each tile is one letter off, always at the start. To spot it, read the tiles that do not fit a plain sports meaning and try swapping their first letters for other letters until a familiar term appears. If four leftover tiles all turn into the same kind of term, you have the group. Solving the other three groups first leaves the four swapped tiles on their own.

Wednesday’s hints, #772, Nov. 4, 2026

Wednesday’s board leans on baseball vocabulary, but it also visits the golf bag and the sideline.

• Yellow: Four results at the plate, named for how far the batter gets.
• Green: Four club types you pull out for short, high shots near the hole.
• Blue: Four words that can all follow the same short word, and each pair comes from a different corner of sport or officiating.
• Purple: Four tiles that look like everyday words but are one first letter away from real terms in a single sport.

Watch for the overlap: a few tiles read like baseball terms yet belong to other groups, so the yellow and purple groups will not take every baseball-sounding word.

More of Wednesday’s puzzles: Connections hints, Wordle hint and Strands hints. Tuesday’s page is still up: Connections: Sports Edition #771. Keep a streak log on our printable weekly calendar.

Wednesday’s answers, #772, Nov. 4, 2026 (spoilers)

Stop here if you are still sorting Wednesday’s tiles.

• Yellow, Parts of a Cycle: Single, Double, Triple, Home Run
• Green, Golf Wedges: Gap, Lob, Pitching, Sand
• Blue, Line ___: Change, Drive, Judge, Out
• Purple, Baseball Pitches, With the First Letter Changed: Butter, Corkball, Glider, Tinker

What each entry is, group by group:

• Yellow: A cycle is a single, a double, a triple and a home run hit by one batter in one game.
• Green: The four wedge names: gap, lob, pitching and sand.
• Blue: Line change (a term in hockey), line drive (baseball), line judge and line out.
• Purple: Change the first letter and you get four real pitch names: Butter becomes Cutter, Corkball becomes Forkball, Glider becomes Slider and Tinker becomes Sinker.

Why Wednesday’s traps worked

Pitching, Out and Drive all sound like baseball, yet the first is a wedge and the other two follow “line.” Home Run is a tile that also fits baseball thinking, but it completes the cycle group. Butter, Corkball, Glider and Tinker are the only tiles that need a letter swap, so once the other three groups are placed they stand alone.

Beebom and Nerdschalk list the same four groups. Puzzle #773 arrives at midnight.