Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Back in the mid-1990s, a grad student named Leroy Alawways began working on his dissertation at the University of California, Davis.

I was a mechanical engineer who did not really like reading.

But in doing the research, he found himself having a ball.

And I was loving it because I would find things that I'm just going,

this is amazing.

This story has to go into the dissertation.

The title of Alloway's project, it was a typically academic mouthful, aerodynamics of the curveball,

an investigation of the effects of angular velocity on baseball trajectories.

That's right, Aalways, in hopes of one day developing innovative batting practice machines,

was studying the physics of the pitch that has frustrated hitters since baseball's earliest days in the 1800s.

But here's the thing. The reason Allaways was having so much fun, well, it's because he stumbled

upon story after story of fans, journalists, and even

physicists disputing whether a baseball could actually curve. In baseball terms, it was the equivalent

of arguing that the earth is flat. It took nearly as long to sort out.

I don't think we'll ever have debates like we had on the curveball.

The Baseball Hall of Fame says the first player to throw a curveball

was a fellow in the 1860s named Candy Cummings.

Cummings played for the Excelsior Baseball club in Brooklyn, but he grew up in Massachusetts,

and it was there as a teenager that the curveball light bulb went off. He was walking down the beach

and picking up clamshells and making the clamshells curve, and he thought wouldn't it be cool if I could make a baseball curve the same way?

Cummings tinkered with grips for a few years, and then, in 1867, started throwing curve balls during games, the first time against Harvard.

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