Baseball lore has it that the curveball was invented in the early 1870s by
Candy Cummings, though this claim is debatable. An early demonstration of the "skewball" or curveball occurred at the
Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn in August 1870 by
Fred Goldsmith. In 1869, a reporter for the
New York Clipper described
Phonney Martin as an "extremely hard pitcher to hit for the ball never comes in a straight line‚ but in a tantalizing curve." If the observation is true, this would pre-date Cummings and Goldsmith. In 1876, the first known collegiate baseball player to perfect the curveball was
Clarence Emir Allen of Western Reserve College, now known as
Case Western Reserve University, where he never lost a game. Both Allen and his teammate John P. Barden became famous for employing the curve in the late 1870s. In the early 1880s,
Clinton Scollard (1860–1932), a pitcher from
Hamilton College in New York, became famous for his curve ball and later earned fame as a prolific American poet. In 1885,
St. Nicholas, a children's magazine, featured a story entitled, "How Science Won the Game". It told of how a boy pitcher mastered the curveball to defeat the opposing batters. The
New York Clipper reported, of a September 26, 1863, game at
Princeton University (then the College of New Jersey), that F. P. Henry's "slow pitching with a great twist to the ball achieved a victory over fast pitching." By 1866, many Princeton players were pitching and hitting "curved balls".
Harvard President
Charles Eliot was among those opposed to the curve, claiming it was a dishonest practice unworthy of Harvard students. At an athletics conference at Yale University in 1884 a speaker (thought to be from Harvard, likely Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, a cousin of the Harvard President) was reported to have stated: "For the pitcher, instead of delivering the ball to the batter in an honest, straightforward way, that the latter may exert his strength to the best advantage in knocking it, now uses every effort to deceive him by curving—I think that is the word—the ball. And this is looked upon as the last triumph of athletic science and skill. I tell you it is time to call halt! when the boasted progress in athletics is in the direction of fraud and deceit." In the past, major league pitchers
Tommy Bridges,
Bob Feller,
Virgil Trucks,
Herb Score,
Camilo Pascual and
Sandy Koufax were regarded as having outstanding curveballs. ==See also==