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.
