While the origin of the curveball might be under debate, the National Baseball Hall of Fame does give Candy Cummings the credit. He made his major league debut on April 22, with a team known as the Hartford Dark Blues.
According to information published on Baseball Almanac, Candy developed the curveball after observing the trajectory shell that was flung into the wind. Cummings has said:. According to the story, that is exactly what he did. He started to experiment with throwing the ball in that manner while playing baseball games with the other boys in his neighborhood.
The experiments were successful and he eventually developed the curveball. There are some who are reluctant to give Cummings credit, stating that it was Phonney Martin who gets the credit for throwing the first professional curveball pitch. When he struck at the ball it seemed to go about a foot beyond the end of his stick. I tried again with the same result, and then I realized that I had succeeded at last. And the day was bittersweet as the Excelsiors lost But he continued to practice the pitch, and when he went pro in , Cummings, with his curving pitch, was considered one of the best.
In each of his six professional seasons, he placed in the top ten in strikeouts. But can we definitively say that Candy Cummings threw the first curveball? But perhaps the biggest name opposite Cummings in the curveball debate is Fred Goldsmith. Goldsmith claimed he was the first to publicly demonstrate the feat in when he set up poles on a field and threw a pitch that curved around them.
But one man who sides with Fred Goldsmith is Bill Stern, a sportscasting legend enshrined both in the radio hall of fame and on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In it, he states:. However, another pitcher named Arthur Cummings popped up, claiming to be the inventor, and quite a few baseball men believed him.
When Freddy Goldsmith heard about this, it broke him up completely. Cummings, proud of his discovery, was keenly protective of his status as the inventor of the curveball, and for the rest of his life he zealously defended his claim against all doubters. In Cummings landed on his fifth team in five years, the Hartford Dark Blues. The season was longer than previous campaigns, so the Hartford club divided the pitching load between Cummings and year-old Tommy Bond , who played right field for the first eight weeks of the campaign while learning the curveball from Cummings.
Bond mastered the pitch by mid-season, and by July he and Cummings provided an effective one-two punch for the Dark Blues. Hartford finished in third place as Cummings went and pitched seven shutouts.
Bond posted a log and batted. Hartford joined the new National League in Cummings, for the first time in six years, stayed with his previous team and returned to the Dark Blues, but at the age of 27 he began to slow down. Candy pitched 24 games in with a record, while Bond went in 45 games as Hartford finished third in the new league. On September 9, , in the first scheduled doubleheader in National League history, Cummings pitched two complete-game victories over Cincinnati.
Candy declined to sign a National League contract that winter, instead joining the Live Oaks of Lynn, Massachusetts, in the new International Association. That winter, Cummings attended the convention that created the new player-controlled league, and the other delegates elected him as the first president of the circuit. However, Cummings did not stay long with the Live Oaks.
He left the team in late June and signed with the Cincinnati Red Stockings of the National League, though he remained president of the International Association for the balance of the season. In Cincinnati, with a worn-out arm and a weak team behind him, Cummings won only five of the 19 games he pitched.
At the age of 28, Candy Cummings came to the end of the line. Other pitchers had learned to throw the curveball, and by batters had figured out how to hit it. Cummings, with his slender frame and small hands, no longer threw a curve well enough to fool the batters, and his arm was sore from 10 years of top-level amateur and professional play.
He pitched briefly in the International Association in , but soon dropped back to the amateur and semipro ranks. Later that year he returned to his hometown of Ware, Massachusetts, where he learned the painting and wallpapering trade.
He played ball sporadically until , when he moved to Athol, Massachusetts, and opened his own paint and wallpaper company, which he operated for more than 30 years. He and his wife, the former Mary Augusta Roberts, whom he married in , raised five children. For the next several decades, Cummings passionately defended his status as the inventor of the curveball. He wrote dozens of articles and letters to editors defending his claim and refuting those, such as former Chicago White Stockings pitcher Fred Goldsmith and others, who claimed authorship of the pitch.
His efforts paid off; by the early s, such influential baseball men as Albert G. Spink had thrown their support to Cummings as the creator of the curve. Today, most baseball historians credit Cummings as the first man to make a ball curve in flight and also as the first to use the pitch successfully under competitive conditions. Cummings retired from his paint and wallpaper business in the late s, and in the widowed year-old moved to Toledo, Ohio, to live with his son Arthur.
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