I published a post about baseball on my blog back in 2016. It concerned the fantasy of the curveball. The curveball does not exist, it has never existed, and it never will exist. The strength of a pitcher’s wrist and fingers simply do not allow him to apply sufficient spin to an object of a baseball’s weight and size to result in any Magnus effect during the four tenths of a second that elapses between the ball’s release and the time it reaches the plate.
This fact was documented in a LIFE magazine article in 1941. The photographer Djon Mili set up his (then new and revolutionary) stroboscopic camera and enlisted the cooperation of Carl Hubbell and Cy Blanton, then conceded to be the foremost masters of the curveball, one in each major league. For the experiment a curve was defined as any deviation, however slight, from a perfectly straight trajectory, either lateral or vertical, with the exception of that produced by gravity.
LIFE’s contention that the curveball never happens was, and still is, heresy. Sports empires have been built on the belief of millions of people worldwide that a pitched baseball can “curve”, “hop”, “dip”, “tail away” and perform other actions when thrown by a highly paid pitcher in a hugely profitable ballpark and broadcast on TV programs that pay fortunes for the privilege (and the profits from advertising between innings). This belief is supported by unanimous testimony from umpires, batters, commentators, sportswriters, and fans, all of whom claim to have witnessed such miracles, and who relish any opportunity to discuss its particular variations. (One-seam, two-seam, four-seam, slider, cutter.) This is the stuff of endless conversation wherever baseball is played. A necessary topic for the hot-stove league.
It is simply wrong.
Belief in the curveball is based, ophthalmologists tell us, on a glitch in our vision system, as it tries to accommodate itself to tracking an object (when it leaves the pitcher’s hand) apparently headed directly at the eye but re-evaluated en route by refined perspective as it comes nearer. The ball was never going to smash into his eye, but the batter’s view of it as it left the pitcher’s hand led his brain to predict that it would. His eye was unable to perceive the tiny deviation that would result instead in a near miss. The ball was always going to miss, but his visual discrimination wasn’t quick enough to see that right away. At the last minute his vision readjusted to reality. Umpires and batters and the writers and fans all interpret this as “movement” and the ball appears to them to have changed direction.
Ask yourself three questions if you want to be convinced.
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Have you ever seen a “long throw” from the outfield to the cutoff man or the catcher, curve on its way? (You have seen a foul ball curve as it approaches the foul pole, but it was not thrown, and it traveled a lot further than 60 feet and it had different forces acting on it.) Tennis balls, golf balls, soccer balls all curve, but the relative speeds and weights are quite different. Bowling balls and curling stones can be made to curve, but they are resting on a surface that provides a grip — however slight — for friction. If Carl Hubbell could have used spin to make his pitches curve surely Ducky Medwick, when he spit into his glove (frequently!) would have by accident produced an occasional curve in his throws to the plate, and clever infielders would have learned to make the ball curve around an obstructing runner in a run-down.
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Think seriously about the “breaking” ball. Have you ever asked yourself how a thrown ball can move in a straight line for 55 feet and then suddenly change direction? What would Newton have to say about the possibility of such behavior? And what would he say about the possibility that a ball could get a variance from the law of gravity to suddenly hop or sink only when it neared the batter?
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Have you ever asked yourself why a so-called “knuckle ball”, that has no spin at all, is considered the most erratic and unpredictable of pitches? The myths about its movement, and the broken fingers of catchers who have trouble catching it, are recurring legends of the sport.
I anticipated that as soon as my blog piece hit the Internet there would be a mass re-evaluation of the game, together with mea culpas in the coaching habits of all those twelve-year-old boys who were ruining their arms by striving to throw “in-shoots” and “down-shoots” and “out-shoots” and become millionaires. If pitching were acknowledged to be a simple combination of velocity and accuracy they could concentrate instead on those things, and on the psychology of the guessing game that is every at-bat. How many kids today are deforming their arm bones and ruining their tendons trying to produce those impossible effects?
No, of course I didn’t really expect instant reform. No more than, I’m sure, the editors of LIFE, boasting a much bigger circulation than my blog, expected similar results back in 1941. Too many tickets, too much money, too many businesses, too many reputations, were dependent on maintaining the fantasy. But I did expect that at least a few pitching coaches might have been paying attention. And maybe some parents.
Judging from what I read on the sports pages, none have as yet. Pitchers are still the stars of the game, and they are still idolized for their mastery of magic tricks that do not exist.
But if we think about it honestly, pitching can only be a guessing game. If I as a batter am expecting a high inside fastball and instead get a low outside changeup, I am pretty well handcuffed. I can’t adjust to that extreme difference in the few tenths of a second before the ball is past me.
Think of a cross-section of the strike zone as a tic-tac-toe diagram. If the pitcher is accurate enough to put the ball in whichever square he chooses, he has nine options. If a batter guesses correctly, he can apply all his skill to actually meeting the ball and driving it. If he guesses wrong, and has to switch his attention to a different square at the last moment, he is at a huge disadvantage. Neither his concentration nor his muscles can react in time. A good pitcher then will be able to make use of those eight-to-one odds. Add to that the mythical belief in “movement” as a psychological excuse for failure, and the pitcher has an overwhelming advantage. In fact this advantage shows most clearly in baseball’s cherished statistics. Batters fail three quarters of the time. Leagues report that the number of annual strikeouts keeps rising as pitchers get taller and stronger.
Nothing could be more inimical to the future of the professional game than a continued slide into the ultimate boredom for spectators — swing-and-a-miss, swing-and-a-miss, swing-and-a-miss, and an occasional home run. Never a chance for the fielders to get into the game at all. They could just sit down in place, as Satchel Page used to signal them to do when he wanted to show off. Why would fans want to pay for three hours of nothing happening? How many times can Junior be taken to the bathroom? How many overpriced hot dogs can you eat? How many celebrities can be introduced? Fortunately, most starting pitchers are not that accurate, even over the five or six innings that is all they are expected to produce these days. As they tire their accuracy suffers. Batters begin to home in on their strategies. They “get used to” a pitcher after a few unsuccessful at-bats and become more confident in their guesses — and more often right.
Managers react to this with a well-stocked bull pens : filled with big strong guys who can throw real heat for maybe only one or two innings before they tire, but who present a fresh problem to batters who suddenly have to forget what they managed to learn about the starter in their earlier at bats, and begin the psychological contest all over again, with fewer innings left to go.
All this mythology is grist for the baseball mill, which devours statistics and spits out predictions and loves to measure and argue the relative skills of players. So what’s the harm? Let the fans have their fun.
But what if we’re not talking about pitching, but other social myths, like “the rule of law” or “brown people are inherently stupider than white people” or “giving a person a lifetime appointment to the legal bench removes ambition and financial temptation”?
The actual facts don’t matter. Beliefs matter. Proof is irrelevant. LIFE sold its million copies in 1941 when it restarted and now we can forget about it. What people think is fact is what really matters; not whether the facts are in fact facts. (Ask the Donald, the master of flim flam and fake news.) Does the enduring myth of the curve ball illustrate that? Is it important that it be pointed out? You tell me.
Vance Weaver 