“Could baseballs really bend along their path, or was it all a collective delusion?” For Pioneer Works Broadcast, Brad Bolman explores the controversies surrounding the curveball since baseball’s rise in popularity at the end of the 19th century—and what these debates reveal about science, shared reality, and American values. It’s a smart and stimulating read, and especially timely for anyone watching this year’s World Series.
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.
More picks about baseball
They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.
The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history.
No One Wanted Them to Win: Texas’ First Baseball Champions
“They could feel their accomplishment slowly being forgotten. The memory of their championship dying with them.”
How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town
“After the A’s announced they were leaving Oakland, a pair of lifelong fans set out to do something audacious: start a beloved pro baseball team of their own. Remarkably, they pulled it off. Now the Oakland Ballers need to survive.”
“It’s Time to Play Ball, British Style”
“A hot dog, a Pimm’s cup and two national anthems: The cultural dissonance of watching America’s pastime in London.”
A Racial Slur and a Fort Myers High Baseball Team Torn Apart
“The avalanche of broken relationships within this baseball community at Fort Myers High . . . served as a microcosm for a polarized country.”
The Long, Strange History of the Baseball Cap
“How did it become both the quintessential piece of a ballplayer’s uniform, as well as the go-to wardrobe accessory for stars, artists, and the common person?”
