K

by Tyler Kepner

  In the bottom of the tenth, after the Cubs had taken a two-run lead in the top of the inning, Maddon called for the right-handed Carl Edwards Jr. to close it out. With two outs and no base runners, Edwards allowed a walk to Brandon Guyer and a run-scoring single to Rajai Davis.

  The Indians had come to the eighth spot in their order, where Coco Crisp had started and gotten two hits. But with one out in the top of the ninth inning of Game 7, the Cubs’ Jason Heyward had stolen second and taken third on a throwing error by the catcher. Fearing a sacrifice fly, Indians manager Terry Francona removed Crisp from right field and replaced him with Michael Martinez, who had a much stronger throwing arm.

  The threat passed. But with the Indians down to their last out of the season, it was Martinez coming to bat, with no position players behind him on the bench. Martinez had a .197 average and just six home runs in almost 600 career trips to the plate. Of all the position players in the last quarter century with as many plate appearances as Martinez, none had a lower OPS—on-base plus slugging percentage—than his .507.

  Martinez was a major league hitter in name only, having gone almost seven weeks since his last hit. And his last hit off a curveball? That had come more than a year earlier, on September 6, 2015. In 11 at-bats since that had ended with a curveball, Martinez had struck out nine times.

  Maddon did not know this specific information, offhand, as Martinez came to bat in the tenth. But he did know that Martinez would have no chance to hit a Mike Montgomery curveball. For Montgomery, the Cubs had distilled their scouting reports on the Indians’ hitters this way: Can he, or can he not, hit your curveball? Martinez most certainly could not. Maddon knew that pitch could win the World Series.

  “I love Montgomery’s curveball in that moment,” Maddon said later, and Montgomery loved it, too.

  Yes, he had lost the pitch in the bullpen. But the positive reinforcement that had washed over him all season, on the field and the computer screen, calmed any nerves he might have felt. He did not stop to imagine the scene back in Chicago, outside Wrigley Field, where throngs of revelers anxiously awaited that blessed “F” on the score strip of the famous red marquee. The final score would stay 8–7, Montgomery believed, if he simply threw that curveball, the fully formed version of the pitch he had thrown to his mom back home.

  She was in the stands now, with Miguel Montero catching. Montero came to the mound and Montgomery asked, “What’s the plan?” They both knew the answer, but Montero said, “Let me think about it,” and trotted back to the plate. Later, Montero would tell his pitcher that of course he had no doubt: curveballs all the way. He just didn’t want Montgomery to dwell on it.

  But Montgomery already was, in a good way.

  “I wasn’t thinking about the World Series, really,” he says. “I was just thinking about me being able to throw a strike in that moment. That’s all I cared about. I knew all I had to do was throw strikes and just take my chances that that was gonna work. Obviously, I’m not gonna walk the guy; that’s not gonna help us. If he hits a homer? I didn’t even think about it. I just said: ‘I’ll just throw a strike and take my chances.’ I have confidence as long as I throw it, especially to that batter, to Michael Martinez, that was the game plan: to throw a curveball in the zone for a strike. And sure enough I throw a perfect first-pitch curveball right in there. He took it for a strike, and at that point I knew it was over, because that was the biggest hurdle, throwing that first one for a strike in that situation. And from there on I was in control.”

  Only seven other pitchers had thrown a pitch that could win or lose the World Series for either team. Now Montgomery’s first had been perfect. He had the right matchup, and he had the right weapon.

  For the final curveball, the one that slayed the Billy Goat and brought a catharsis to millions, Montgomery set his sights on the middle of the batter’s box on the first base side. Nearly seven months before, Prince Fielder had stood there in Texas and watched the pitch buckle into the zone for strike three. This one was not as sharp, a little lazier, but still low and tight enough that a hitter like Martinez could do nothing with it. He tapped it softly to third, where Kris Bryant scrambled in to scoop it. Bryant lost his footing but still fired across the infield to Anthony Rizzo, who made the catch and raised his arms in triumph. Rizzo stuffed the ball in his back left pocket and romped toward Bryant. Montgomery flung his glove in the air and embraced them. He got the glove back but never touched the ball again.

  “When we had our parade, a couple of us went up to [Rizzo] and said, ‘You know, that’s supposed to be my ball, that was my first-ever save,’ ” Montgomery said. “But he had it because he presented it to Ricketts at that time. I’m OK with that.”

  Tom Ricketts owns the Cubs, so he got the curse-breaking curveball. Montgomery got a ring, a memory, and the certainty that his job is the best there is.

  “I enjoy, obviously, being competitive—but I also enjoy just the creativity you can have being a pitcher, because you’re the one in control,” Montgomery said. “You’re the one with the paintbrush. Everyone else is reacting to what you do.”

  The reaction to Montgomery’s curveball was overwhelming joy, bottled up since 1908. By then the pitch had been around just 45 years, from its beginnings on a craggy beach in Brooklyn. Or so the legend goes.

  * * *

  ————

  If you had to group pitches into two categories, you would choose “fastball” and “other.” The “other” makes pitching interesting. If the ball went straight every time, pitchers would essentially be functionaries, existing merely to serve the hitters. Long ago, that is just what they were, as the name implies. Think of pitching horseshoes: you’re making an underhand toss to a specific area. That was pitching for much of the 1800s. For 20 years—1867 through 1886—batters could specify whether they wanted the pitch high or low. The poor pitcher was forced to comply.

  Baseball might have continued as a test of hitting, running, and fielding skills had pitchers not discovered their potential for overwhelming influence. What if they could make the pitch behave differently? Long before cameras and websites could classify every pitch into a type, many of the offerings intended to deceive a hitter—in-shoots and out-shoots, in-curves and out-curves and drops, in the old parlance—were largely known as curveballs. The “other” was, simply, everything that wasn’t a fastball.

  In researching the history of curveballs at the Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, I was struck by how many people claimed to be the inventor. In 1937 The New York Times published an obituary of a man named Billy Dee of Chester, New Jersey, who was said to have invented the curveball in 1881. Dee threw a baseball with frayed seams and, intrigued by its movement, said he practiced and practiced until “I soon was able to loop the old apple without the benefit of the damaged seam.” Sounds impressive—but what’s this? A 1948 Times obituary of one George McConnell of Los Angeles, “an old-time Indian fighter” who “decided that the ‘English’ being put on billiard balls could be used with a baseball.” That was in 1878.

  There are many more such stories in the files and the history books at Cooperstown. Fred Goldsmith has a case, like James Creighton and Phonie Martin and Alvah Hovey and more. There’s even a hoary old Ivy League debate from the 1870s: Did Charles Avery of Yale curve first, or Joseph Mann of Princeton?

  Peter Morris untangles it all in A Game of Inches, quoting a letter from Mann to the Times in 1900 that sums it up neatly: “As long as baseball has been played and baseballs have had seams with which to catch the air, curve balls have been thrown.”

  Mann goes on to assert that, in spite of this, no one thought to use those curving balls for pitching until he did so in 1874. Then again, Mann admits he was inspired by watching Candy Cummings one day at Princeton. Mann said Cummings’s catcher told him he could make the ball curve, though it did not do so that day.

  Confused yet? The plaq
ue in the Hall of Fame gallery for W. A. “Candy” Cummings boldly settles things in seven gilded words: “Pitched first curve ball in baseball history.” The plaque dates this discovery to 1867, when Cummings was the amateur ace of the Brooklyn Stars. History should always be so easy.

  The Cummings backstory is so indelible, so rich in imagery, that if it’s not true…well, it should be. It has never been debunked and would be impossible to do so. Cummings is practically a charter member of the Hall, going in with the fourth class of inductees in 1939. His story links the discovery of the curveball to the curiosity of a 14-year-old boy on a beach in Brooklyn. What could be more American than that?

  Here is how Cummings described it for Baseball Magazine in 1908:

  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.

  Cummings was born in 1848 in Ware, Massachusetts, and various accounts say that he played the old Massachusetts game before moving to Brooklyn. Cummings himself did not mention this in his retelling of the curveball’s origin story, but to Morris, it was a significant detail. In the 1850s, pitchers in Massachusetts were permitted to throw overhand, which made curveballs easier to throw.

  “He had probably seen rudimentary curves thrown as a youngster in Massachusetts, and when he moved to Brooklyn and began playing the ‘New York game,’ the delivery restrictions made the pitch seem impossible,” Morris wrote. “Yet the example of throwing clamshells made him think that it might be possible, and his arm strength and relentless practice enabled him to realize his ambition.”

  Cummings emphasized two points: his solitary persistence in perfecting the pitch despite ridicule from his friends, and the physical toll imposed by the delivery restrictions of the day. Pitchers then worked in a four-by-six-foot box, and could not lift either foot off the ground until the ball was released.

  “The arm also had to be kept near the side and the delivery was made with a perpendicular swing,” Cummings said, in an undated interview published after his career. “By following these instructions it was a hard strain, as the wrist and the second finger had to do all the work. I snapped the ball away from me like a whip and this caused my wrist bone to get out of place quite often. I was compelled to wear a supporter on my wrist all one season on account of this strain.”

  Cummings left Brooklyn for a boarding school in Fulton, New York, in 1864. He tinkered with his curveball there—“My boy friends began to laugh at me, and to throw jokes at my theory of making a ball go sideways”—and joined the Star Juniors, an amateur team in Brooklyn. From there he was recruited to the Excelsior Club as a junior member, in both age and size: he would grow to be 5 foot 9, but his weight topped out at 120 pounds.

  In the curveball, though, Cummings found an equalizer. He showed that pitchers of all sizes could rely on movement and deception—not simply on power—to succeed. Soon, the notion would be ingrained as baseball fact that a pitcher with dominant stuff could humble even the brawniest hitter. Cummings began to prove this in 1867, with the Excelsiors in a game at Harvard.

  “A surge of joy flooded over me that I shall never forget,” he wrote in the Baseball Magazine piece. “I felt like shouting out that I had made a ball curve; I wanted to tell everybody; it was too good to keep to myself. But I said not a word, and saw many a batter at that game throw down his stick in disgust. Every time I was successful I could scarcely keep from dancing from pure joy. The secret was mine.”

  The movement could be very erratic, Cummings conceded, but in time he learned to control it, and to manipulate the umpires. When the ball started at a hitter’s body, and caused him to jump before bending into the strike zone, the umpire called it a ball. Cummings adjusted by starting the pitch in the middle so he could get strikes, even though the movement carried it away.

  “When it got to the batter it was too far out,” he said. “Then there would be a clash between the umpire and the batter.”

  By age 23 Cummings was a pitcher for the New York Mutuals of the National Association. The pitching was done from 45 feet away, in that box, with a sidearm motion—and the numbers were similarly unrecognizable today. Cummings started 55 of the Mutuals’ 56 games, working 497 innings and giving up 604 hits, with a 33–20 record and a 3.01 earned run average. When the National League began in 1876, Cummings pitched for the Hartford Dark Blues and went 16–8. He went 5–14 for the Cincinnati Reds in 1877, his final season.

  A curious contemporary, Bobby Mathews, would go on to have more success. Mathews was even shorter than Cummings—just 5 foot 5—and as their careers overlapped in the National Association, Mathews was one of the few who could mimic Cummings’s sidearm curve. Generations of pitchers would follow Mathews’s example: see something interesting, study it, and make it their own.

  “He watched Cummings’ hands carefully, noting how he held the ball and how he let it go, and after a few weeks’ careful practice in the same way could see the curve in his own delivery,” explained an 1883 article from The Philadelphia Press, unearthed by Morris. “Then he began to use it in matches, striking men out in a way that no one but Cummings had ever done before, and in a short time he was known as one of the most effective pitchers in the field.”

  That was the first of three consecutive 30-win seasons by Mathews for the Philadelphia Athletics of the American Association. He did not make the Hall of Fame, but he followed Cummings as the curveball’s most prominent practitioner, carrying the pitch through the sidearm era and helping to establish it as fundamental to the game.

  Assuming that you believed in it at all.

  * * *

  ————

  For decades after Cummings’s last pitch, many people doubted the very notion that a ball could curve. It was a staple of baseball debate that the curveball just might be an optical illusion. A favorite exercise for skeptics was to challenge a pitcher to prove his powers by bending a ball around a series of poles. This happened a lot.

  “The majority of college professors really believe that the curve ball was as impossible as the transmutation of gold from potato skins,” said a man named Ben Dodson, in the Syracuse Herald in 1910.

  Dodson said he witnessed a demonstration at Harvard by Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, probably in the 1880s. Radbourn—whose “pitching deity; dapper gent” persona would one day make him a Twitter sensation—was an early hero of the National League. In 1884, for the Providence Grays, he was 59–12 with a 1.38 ERA and 73 complete games. The professors, safe to say, had a lot of misplaced confidence when they arranged their poles and dared Radbourn to throw curves to his catcher, Barney Gilligan.

  “Radbourn, standing to the right of the pole arcade, started what appeared to be a perfectly straight delivery,” Dodson said. “It turned with a beautiful inward bend and passed behind the pole just in front of Gilligan—an inshoot, and a corker. He repeated this several times. Then, standing inside the upper part of the pole-zone, he threw outshoots that went forty feet dead on a line, and swung out of the arcade.”

  Dodson went on to describe Radbourn’s “drop balls,” though not all of these pitches were curves, as we think of them today. Radbourn threw a wide array of pitches that would now be classified as curveballs, changeups, sinkers, screwballs, and so on. That day at Harvard, his charge was to prove that something besides a fastball really did exist, and Dodson, for one, considered the matter closed.

  “It was a wonderful demonstration and settled the argument about curve pitching forever,” he said. “And yet—because they never thought about publicity in those days—not a reporter was at hand, and the story lives only in the memories of those wh
o saw it done.”

  What a pity. For some, the matter was still debatable midway into the next century, as Carl Erskine recalls. As a minor leaguer, Erskine had gotten a tip from a rival manager, Jack Onslow, who told him he was telegraphing his curveball by the way he tucked it into his hand. In Cuba before the 1948 season, Erskine taught himself a new grip and trusted it one day to preserve a shutout after a leadoff triple in the ninth. The circumstances mattered, because the team had a standing bonus of $25 for a shutout.

  “My inclination was, ‘Oh boy, I gotta go back to my old curve, I gotta get this shutout,’ ” Erskine says. “So I had a little meeting on the mound with myself, tossed the rosin bag: ‘You made a commitment that you weren’t gonna go back to the old curve; stick to it’—and I got the side out without that run scoring. From then on, I had good confidence in that, and the rest is history.”

  Erskine’s history included five pennants with the Dodgers and one narrowly missed brush with infamy. On October 3, 1951, he was warming up in the bottom of the ninth inning at the Polo Grounds alongside Ralph Branca, with the pennant at stake against the Giants. Manager Charlie Dressen called to the bullpen and asked a coach, Clyde Sukeforth, which pitcher looked better.

  Dressen liked the curveball; he would say of the slider, disdainfully: “They slide in and slide out of the ballpark.” But when Sukeforth reported that Erskine was bouncing his curve, Dressen chose Branca.

  “People say, ‘Carl, what was your best pitch in your 12 major league seasons?’ ” Erskine says with a laugh. “I say it was a curveball I bounced in the bullpen at the Polo Grounds. It could have been me.”