October 18 - Candy Cummings

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On this day, in 1848, William Arthur Cummings, inventor of the curveball, was born in Ware, Massachusetts. William made his sort of professional baseball debut at the age of seventeen when he became a pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors. I say sort of because the Excelsiors were one of the teams in the National Association of Base Ball Players, an organization that predated true professional leagues. All teams in the NABBP (notice the two Bs, signifying that the name of the sport was considered to be two separate words at this point) started out as amateur. As baseball increased in popularity and teams began secretly paying some of their star players in order to keep them on the roster, the NABBP decided in 1869 that teams could become professional as long as they declared that they were and therefore somehow upheld the integrity of the sport. The Exelsiors never went professional but continued to play against the teams that did. It was an arrangement that didn’t last for long.

By 1871, all of the professional teams of the NABBP no longer wanted to be burdened with having to play amateurs and they formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Only one team that made the transition between those two organizations still survives today: the Chicago Cubs (although they were called the Chicago White Stockings during those years). As many as thirty teams were part of the NAPBBP during its five year run. The problem was that many of them were based in towns that were simply too small to support a professional team, places like Rockford, Illinois and Middletown, Connecticut. As a result, in 1876, six teams from the NAPBBP (Chicago, Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis) joined with two independent teams (Cincinnati and Louisville) to form the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. The National League still exists today as one half of Major League Baseball but there is disagreement over which group is actually the first professional sports league in the world (MLB doesn’t recognize the NAPBBP even though it technically came first).

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But getting back to William. He played with the Excelsiors for two seasons before switching to the Brooklyn Stars, another amateur team, for three more. His pitching prowess earned him the nickname “Candy” which was often given to young men of the era who were considered experts at whatever it was they did. Candy made his NAPBBP debut on April 22, 1872 as a pitcher for the New York Mutuals. He would play for three other teams over the next four years: the Baltimore Canaries, the Philadelphia White Stockings and the Hartford Dark Blues. He stayed with Hartford when the team joined the National League in 1876, racking up a 16-8 record with the team before switching to the Cincinnati Red Stockings for his final season in 1877.

Following a disappointing 5-14 year with the Reds, Candy left the National League to become the first president of the International Association of Professional Base Ball Players. The IAPBBP was a short lived rival to the National League that could call itself international because it included two teams from Canada. Perhaps the only claim to fame that the IAPBBP can genuinely muster is that in 1878, Pitcher Bud Fowler became the first known African-American to play organized professional baseball, 69 years before Jackie Robinson.

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Candy credited the invention of his famous curveball to hours spent at the Massachusetts shore hurling seashells into the ocean with his cousins. Noticing that the shells had a distinct curve to their trajectory when thrown a certain way, Candy, already a baseball aficionado at that point, wondered if he could get a baseball to do the same thing. With a bit of practice, he found that he could. He supposedly used a curveball for the first time in 1867 with the Brooklyn Excelsiors but he couldn’t use it effectively until he was with the Brooklyn Stars and partnered with a catcher named Nat Hicks. Up until that point, catchers stood about 20 feet behind a batter making it nearly impossible to field anything other than a straightforward pitch. Nat stood directly behind the batter and could field curveballs with ease. Of course this is just Major League Baseball’s official version of how the curveball came to be. Other people claim that Harvard University pitchers were doing it as early as 1863 and some say it didn’t come about until Fred Goldsmith did it in 1870. While it’s not possible to definitively prove any one theory and the debate will most likely rage on for several more generations, most of the credit across the board is given to Candy.

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Candy ended his career with a 145-94 record, a 2.49 ERA and 259 strikeouts. He was also the first pitcher to record two complete games on a single day, September 9, 1876, when the Hartford Dark Blues beat the Cincinnati Red Stockings 14-4 and 8-4 in a double header. Following baseball, Candy owned a paint shop in Athol, Massachusetts and received royalties from a railroad coupling that he invented. He passed away on May 16, 1924 in Toledo, Ohio at the age of 74. Fifteen years later he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 Also on this day, in Disney history: The Jungle Book