Baseball

YOUR LYIN’ EYES:

How the ‘Moneyball’ Oakland A’s Reinvented Baseball and Beyond: The team showed the sport—and plenty of other businesses—a new way to build a successful team (Jared Diamond, April 16, 2026, WSJ)

Yet for as long as America’s love affair with baseball has lasted, the sport’s practitioners knew shockingly little about how the game was truly played for most of that time. Teams built their rosters while relying on rudimentary statistics like batting average and runs batted in for hitters and win-loss record for pitchers. They deployed strategies like the sacrifice bunt and stolen base with remarkable frequency despite lacking real evidence to justify such usage.

These were simple concepts to understand, but unbeknown to almost everybody for generations, they might have been flawed. Batting average counts every type of hit as equal, even though home runs are clearly worth more than singles. A starter’s record fails to take into account the quality of the teammates around him. Bunting means willingly giving up one of your 27 outs, the most precious resource that exists in the game.

The problem was that until recently, nobody realized that everything they thought they understood about baseball might be wrong.

Analytics removes emotion.

LIES OUR TEACHERS TOLD US:

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve: Sports, science, and collective delusion. (Brad Bolman, 10.22.25, Pioneer Works)

The first curveball is generally credited to William Arthur Cummings, a star of mid-nineteenth-century baseball, who earned the nickname “Candy” for his sweet mastery of the craft. Using an underhanded motion, Cummings twisted his hand as he released the ball, producing an initially straight pitch that curved away to the side as it reached home plate. He claimed his inspiration was the spiraling motion of tossed clamshells. In September 1875, his “peculiar inside-curving ball” was noted in coverage of a game between the professional squad from Hartford, Connecticut, that Cummings played for and an amateur team from Ludlow, Massachusetts. (The amateurs still won the game, the early equivalent of a local rec team defeating the Yankees.)

As other pitchers began to integrate Candy’s technique, newspaper discussion of “curved ball” pitching spread across the eastern U.S. In 1877, the Evansville Daily Courier of Indiana hailed a new local hurler who pitched “the popular ‘curved’ ball so swiftly that no one in the club was able to strike the balls.” After years of batters’ domination, curving balls rebalanced the scales back in the pitchers’ favor. Within a decade, the curveball was heralded as a revolution—“the greatest change ever introduced into the game,” according to an account from 1883, around the same time that Candy considered retiring to become a house painter.

How the curve worked, however, was initially a mystery. “Please tell me what a curved ball is in playing base-ball,” asked one Cincinnati Enquirer reader in May 1876. That August, another inquired, “What is meant by a curved ball—is it a pitch or an underhand throw, how does it curve, and can you explain how it is done, how the ball is held, etc.?” The curveball was, in the first place, a tactical curiosity for passionate fans and aspiring players. With many men eager to make a nickel on the new national pastime, mastering the pitch promised upward mobility. Yet as the Enquirer’s answers made clear, its exact mechanics were elusive: “A curved ball is one which leaves the hand in a straight line and just before it reaches the home plate suddenly curves out toward the end of the bat…. by a twist or twirl of the ball that can not well be described.” Commonality did not initially mean common understanding.

Originally an art to be mastered, the great curveballers were labeled “artists” for decades. But over time, the pragmatic matter of how to throw a curveball became a scientific problem: Was it even possible to do so? Spectators, after all, had witnessed balls that appeared to contradict the laws of motion. That all this might simply be trickery of the eye accorded with a widespread wariness in the late nineteenth century about fraud and deception. Newspapers of the era abounded with accounts of sleight-of-hand subterfuge: “Pepper’s ghost,” for instance, in which reflective glass panes made an off-stage ghost appear to float before theater audiences, wowed crowds from London to New Orleans. Magic was often just a trick of the eye.

“Why does a ball ‘curve?’” asked Columbus Ohio’s Dispatch in July 1876. Here was a question “our scientific heads can spend a deal of brain power in solution of.” While it was widely accepted that the “laws of motion” made a curving pitch impossible, the Dispatch conceded “it is a fact … that there is such a thing as curved balls. Every base-ballist knows it.” The everyday know-how of players seemed to trump the public understanding of science. Could it be, as one popular theory proposed, that the force of air against the ball slowed one rotating side more than the other and produced a curving motion? The Dispatch granted that “the thinking men among us may ferret out something more probable.” Debates continued: In July 1877, “several young men” wrote the Minneapolis Tribune that they were fully divided on whether it was possible to throw a curving ball. In September, a writer asked the Chicago Inter-Ocean to “Explain the philosophy that governs the curved ball as thrown by some of the professional baseball players of the United States, or as curved on a billiard table by scientific players.” People wanted not just to behold or even throw the curve themselves, but to understand how it could be possible in the first place.

SHE DUG THE LONG BALL:

The surprising feminist history of baseball’s biggest anthem (Chloe Veltman, 4/02/26, NPR: All Things Considered)

“Take Me Out” was not only catchy, “it also had very unusual lyrics,” Clermont said. At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote, but were playing in women’s leagues and filling the stands at occasional “Ladies Days,” “Take Me Out” celebrates a fictional young woman’s deep and abiding passion for baseball:

Katie Casey saw all the games.
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong.
All along, good and strong.

“She didn’t want to just go to the ballpark, sit in the bleachers and be silent or whatever,” Clermont said of the song’s hard-hitting protagonist. “She wanted to participate.”

NO THOUGHT TERRIFIES HUMAN BEINGS MORE….:

The Bottom of the Ninth: In baseball and in life, there is a cost to our pursuit of an error-free existence (Elizabeth D. Samet | March 26, 2026, American Scholar)

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

…than that no one is in control of events. Free will forces personal accountability.

LOVE LIKE A TIDAL WAVE:

The Green Fields of the Mind (A. Bartlett Giamatti,)

The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

ALL IN THE WRISTS:

The Alabama Boy Makes Good: Hank Aaron, Legend of the Negro World ( Gerald Early, October 31, 2025, Common Reader)

I went to Connie Mack Stadium, Shibe Park to the older generation, fairly often as a kid, not to see the Phillies but to see the opposing team, especially the Dodgers (to see Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch), the Pirates (to see outfielder Roberto Clemente), the Giants (to see Willie Mays and the majestic Juan Marichal), and the Braves (to see Aaron but also to see pitcher Warren Spahn and Eddie Matthews). I saw Aaron hit a home run at a game I attended. I will never forget how hard he hit the ball, and how effortless and graceful his swing. Oh, those magical wrists of his! I imitated that swing for a while when I played youth baseball. It made my wrists and forearms ache. That did not dissuade me. I finally stopped when one of the coaches I would hit better if I stopped doing a poor imitation of Aaron. My hands were big, so he would yell at me to just use my hands to hit, not my wrists. “Don’t lead with your wrists,” he would shout, “Just let your wrists follow your hands.” He was right. When I stopped imitating Aaron, I did hit better. I guess Aaron’s way of hitting worked for Aaron and probably nobody else, certainly not for star-struck kids of small talent like me. That is the way it is with great hitters, sui generis.

One probable cause of Aaron’s nearly unique wrist strength must have been the fact that he hit cross-handed (right below left) when he was a young player. (try taking a swing that way and you’ll get the picture)

OUR TEACHERS WERE GASLIGHTING US:

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve (Brad Bolman, 10.22.25, Pioneer Works)

In October 1877, the Cincinnati Enquirer hosted a debate between two physics professors in Ohio over a broiling national controversy: Was there such a thing as a curveball?

Pitchers claimed they were throwing them, batters claimed they were missing them, and fans claimed they were seeing them, but a chorus of doubters argued that the “curved ball” was a physical and scientific impossibility. On one side of the Enquirer debate was Orange Nash Stoddard, a distinguished science professor at Wooster University, lovingly nicknamed the “Little Wizard” by students. On the other was Robert White McFarland, a mathematician and civil engineer at Ohio Agricultural, which we now know as Ohio State. Stoddard’s position: “There is no such thing.” McFarland’s: “There is a curve.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, baseball was rapidly professionalizing and growing in popularity. For many, its geometric diamond arrangement and the spectacular physics of bat and ball made it a truly scientific sport. In turn, fans, players, commentators, and even natural scientists used baseball to test theories about the natural world. How far could a hit ball travel? Could a thrown ball really curve? Although debates over the curve are known to fans and sports historians alike, they are usually understood in a narrative of progress: an old misperception of physics that inevitably gave way to scientific truth. But the curveball debate was more than that. It was an argument about the contours of our shared reality. Could baseballs really bend along their path, or was it all a collective delusion?