Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 10-15-2018

Harrisburg Telegraph, October 15, 1918:

Three-fourths of all the male Americans under 40 years of age who have played baseball have been able at one time or another to throw a curve ball. Probably the estimate is unnecessarily conservative. Nearly everybody who can chuck the horsehide at all can perpetrate a roundhouse outshoot.
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On this afternoon in 1878—thirty-nine years after baseball had succeeded townball as a game—and argument arose regarding rumors that there lived a certain man who could curve a thrown ball at will. The debate…grew so torrid that carpenters were called in. They built two ten-foot fences, about twenty feet apart, and in the same plane. Midway between them a post was planted.

[George] Wright called “Tommy” Bond, a great Boston righthander of the championship seventies, and ordered him to perform. Standing slightly to the left of the first fence, Bond succeeded…in throwing a ball that passed the post on the right and passed the second fence on the left.
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Then it was that curve-ball pitching was accepted as a scientific fact…Knowing for a fact that the thing could be done, experimenters in every hamlet afflicted with baseball inclinations began to practice bending the onion. Shortly thereafter all clubs had gay deceivers on the slab.

Tommy Bond spent the 1875 season pitching for the Hartford Dark Blues alongside a guy named Candy Cummings. There’s some dispute about whether Cummings invented the pitch, but it’s clear that the ‘75 Dark Blues had a pitching staff made up entirely of gay deceivers.