Earlier this year, I went down a weird rabbit hole about pitching in baseball when I read some centuries-old debates about whether it’s physically possible to throw a curveball. As it turns out, a lot of late-19th century natural scientists didn’t think so.

Sports writers and historians have explored this history before, for instance in Tyler Kepner’s K. But the curve controversies are usually folded into a basic narrative of scientific progress: people used to think curves were impossible because they didn’t understand physics properly!

But this makes it hard to understand one of the strangest parts about the debates: that they continued long after academic physicists had settled the “science.” I started to think that debates over the curve were just as much about what it means to be American, and to resist forms of social mystification, than they were about what’s “true” in an objective sense. So I wrote about that!

You can read the piece here at Pioneer Works Broadcast.

(There’s a pretty rich visual history to the curve investigations, so a few image snippets are below.)