Candy Cummings

William Arthur Cummings is credited with inventing the curveball, a claim that gave him a place in the Hall of Fame despite a brief and statistically modest major league career. He pitched in the National Association and the early National League, and his 1939 induction recognized the pitch itself more than the pitcher.

Ware, Massachusetts

Cummings was born in Ware, Massachusetts, on October 18, 1848. The story he told throughout his life was that he conceived the idea of throwing a curved pitch as a teenager, watching clamshells curve through the air when he threw them on a Brooklyn beach. He spent years experimenting with the grip and release, and by the late 1860s he was throwing a pitch that broke sideways in a way no other pitcher could replicate.

The curveball's existence was itself controversial in its early years. Batters, journalists, and scientists debated whether a baseball could actually curve in flight or whether the movement was an optical illusion. Cummings first used the pitch competitively on October 7, 1867, against Harvard. The debate continued for years afterward, but pitchers across the country were already copying the delivery.

The National Association and the National League

Cummings pitched for the New York Mutuals in the National Association beginning in 1872 and won 33 games in his first season. He moved through Baltimore and Philadelphia before joining the Hartford Dark Blues for the National Association's final season in 1875. When the National League formed in 1876, Cummings pitched for Hartford and went 16-8. He was elected the first president of the International Association in February 1877, a rival circuit whose organizers considered it an equal to the National League rather than a subordinate league.

He initially pitched for the Lynn Live Oaks in the International Association during the 1877 season before joining the Cincinnati club in the National League, where he went 5-14. The curveball had spread across baseball, and younger pitchers threw it harder and with more movement than Cummings himself could manage. The pitch he popularized made his own skills ordinary by comparison.

After Baseball

Cummings left professional baseball after 1877 and spent the rest of his life in various occupations, including running a paint and wallpaper business in Athol, Massachusetts. He remained proud of his association with the curveball and told the clamshell story to interviewers for decades.

He died on May 16, 1924, in Toledo, Ohio, at age 75. The Old Timers Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1939, honoring the invention rather than the career. His major league record was modest, and he pitched in an era before the mound was set at its modern distance. But every pitcher who has thrown a breaking ball since the 1870s owes a debt to the delivery Cummings spent his teenage years perfecting on a Brooklyn beach.