In October 1877, the Cincinnati Enquirer hosted a debate between two physics professors in Ohio over a broiling national controversy: Was there such a thing as a curveball?
Pitchers claimed they were throwing them, batters claimed they were missing them, and fans claimed they were seeing them, but a chorus of doubters argued that the “curved ball” was a physical and scientific impossibility. On one side of the Enquirer debate was Orange Nash Stoddard, a distinguished science professor at Wooster University, lovingly nicknamed the “Little Wizard” by students. On the other was Robert White McFarland, a mathematician and civil engineer at Ohio Agricultural, which we now know as Ohio State. Stoddard’s position: “There is no such thing.” McFarland’s: “There is a curve.”
At the end of the nineteenth century, baseball was rapidly professionalizing and growing in popularity. For many, its geometric diamond arrangement and the spectacular physics of bat and ball made it a truly scientific sport. In turn, fans, players, commentators, and even natural scientists used baseball to test theories about the natural world. How far could a hit ball travel? Could a thrown ball really curve? Although debates over the curve are known to fans and sports historians alike, they are usually understood in a narrative of progress: an old misperception of physics that inevitably gave way to scientific truth. But the curveball debate was more than that. It was an argument about the contours of our shared reality. Could baseballs really bend along their path, or was it all a collective delusion?
A century of debate about the curve shows how professional and amateur sports served as venues not only for entertainment but for knowledge production. Curving baseballs invited researchers to rethink their understanding of physics and test inherited theories against physical demonstration. In turn, the debates brought new understandings of physics to a reading and sporting public. Debating the curve was an opportunity to grapple with the complexity of our physical world. But the curve controversies were also about what it meant to live in that world, and particularly what it meant to be American; about truth and deception in public life. The very question of whether there is such a thing as a curveball revealed how our societies and our knowledge of the physical world evolve in constant dialogue.
