Eighteenth in a season-long series
Who threw the first curve ball? This was a matter of dispute 150 years ago and, despite the Hall of Fame plaque controversially awarded to Candy Cummings in 1939 (his won-lost record in MLB was 21–22), it may remain so. Not long ago, David Arcidiacono wrote an article for the scholarly journal Base Ball that he titled, “Return to Conventional Wisdom on Candy Cummings.”
That is where I have landed, too. Other pitchers may have established competing claims of authorship, more or less convincing. Some of his contemporaries, like Cummings himself, went on to toil in the professional leagues, such as Fred Goldsmith, Phonney Martin, Bobby Mathews, Terry Larkin, and Tommy Bond, while collegiate twirlers Ham Avery (Yale) and Joseph Mann (Princeton) had their supporters too. But Cummings’ claim still seems the best, and he rode it — and wrote it, as you’ll see below — into immortality.
Even in this age of 100-mile-per-hour fastballs, it is spin rate and “late” movement that most mystify batters, even those whose reflexes have developed in tandem with the technique of today’s pitchers. Cummings had to deliver his curve underhand, according to the rules of the day, with one foot just inside the front line of a “pitcher’s box,” and the other inside the rear line. The ball had to be released below the waist, and the distance then mandated was only 45 feet. So Cummings could not throw a modern curve — one that breaks downward as well as laterally — and he admittedly had to add a then-illegal twist to the wrist, imperceptible to the lone umpire.
Earlier pitching heroes like Frank Pidgeon in the 1850s had to rely upon changing speeds and high-arced lobs. Jim Creighton and Joe Sprague imparted twist, in the same technically illegal way as Cummings. Cricket bowlers, too, had applied spin to the ball by rotating their wrist to make the ball, which could be delivered on a bounce, carom off the turf in an unpredictable way.
In 1908, more than thirty years after he had delivered his last curve in earnest, Cummings wrote of his boyhood in Brooklyn (he had been born William Arthur Cummings in Ware, Massachusetts, on October 17, 1848):
In the summer of 1863 a number of boys and myself were amusing ourselves by throwing clam shells (the hard shell variety) and watching them sail along through the air, turning now to the right, and now to the left. We became interested in the mechanics of it and experimented for an hour or more. All of a sudden it came to me that it would be a good joke on the boys if I could make a baseball curve the same way….
In 1864 I went to Fulton, New York, to a boarding school, and remained there a year and a half. All that time I kept experimenting with my curved ball.
In another of his several accounts of how he launched the curve, Cummings wrote that he had debuted his endlessly practiced pitch not with the Brooklyn Excelsiors at Harvard in 1867, as is typically described, but at that Fulton boarding school — the Falley Seminary — two years earlier. Here’s how the Syracuse Journal described young Cummings and his unique pitch in 1912:
[He was] a little bit of a fellow, and in his best pitching days did not weigh over 120 pounds, but he was as plucky and nervy a kid as they make, and the most graceful pitcher the game ever knew. When conditions were right, with the wind against his pitching, Cummings could make the ball talk, and could get control of his sailing ball that Doug Allison, his catcher [in later years] called “the swallow.” Doug would throw up both hands and say: “It’s all over; they can’t hit you with an oar.”[.]
Up in Fulton there is a silver ball in the window of a clothing store that was won May 19, 1866, by the team that represented the Falley Seminary of Fulton. It was in that game that [Arthur Cummings] claims he pitched his first curve ball in a regular game. On the silver ball are engraved the [names of the players] who all swear that Cummings used a curve ball in that game.
Those wishing to derogate Cummings’ pitch might call it a “schoolboy” or “roundhouse” curve. But others soon developed offshoots. Hoss Radbourn, before overhand pitching was allowed in 1884, had developed a “raise curve.” Ed “The Only” Nolan developed a drop curve. Will White and John Ward were the first to work the sharp curve and “in-shoot” as far back as 1878. Righthander Charlie Sweeney of Providence developed a fadeaway or screwball pitch, one that broke inward to righty batters.
In his classes at the Falley Seminary in Fulton, Cummings never learned the science behind how he made objects curve. But in 1738, Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli had explained it. From The New York Times Book of Science Literacy:
The ordinary curveball, breaking to the left or the right, relies on a lateral force caused by its rapid spin. The sideways spin lowers the pressure on one side and raises it on the other. The effect of spin is potent. A ball spinning at 1,800 revolutions per minute a ball that will turn about 15 times in its 60-foot, 6-inch journey to the plate will feel a sideways force of more than an ounce, which will turn its path by about one and a half feet.
So even if Cummings didn’t “invent” the game’s most perfidious pitch — though I believe he did — he was the first to envision curving the ball in the air. He earned his plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
PIONEERS: Candy Cummings was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.