Personal History of the Curveball

It came to us like sex.
Years before we ever faced the thing,
we’d heard about the curve
and studied it. Aerial photos
snapped by night in Life, mapping
Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell’s sidearm hook,
made it look a fake: the dotted line
hardly swerved at all.
Such power had to be a gift
or else some trick; we didn’t care which.
My hope was on technique.
In one mail-order course in hypnotism
that I took from the back-cover
of a comic book, the hypnotist
like a ringmaster wore a suit,
sporting a black, Errol Flynn mustache
as he loomed, stern but benign
over a maiden.
Her eyes half-closed, she gazed
upward at his eyes, ready
to obey, as the zigzag strokes
of his hypnotic power, emanating
from his fingertips and eyes,
passed into her stilled, receptive face.
She could feel
the tingling force-field of his powers.
After school, not knowing
what to look for, only
that we’d know it when it came—
that it would be strange—
we'd practice curves, trying
through trial and error to pick up by luck
whatever secret knack a curveball took,
sighting down the trajectory
of each pitch we caught
for signs of magic.
Those throws spun in like drills
and just as straight,
every one the same.
In Ebbets Field I’d watch
Sal “The Barber” Maglie train
his batter with a hard one at the head
for the next pitch,
some dirty sleight of hand down and away
he’d picked up somewhere
in the Mexican League. Done,
he’d trudge in from the mound.
His tired, mangy face had no illusions.
But the first curve I ever threw
that worked astonished me
as much as the lefty cleanup man I faced.
He dropped, and when I grinned
smiled weakly back. What he’d seen
I couldn’t even guess
until one tepid evening in the Pony League
I stepped in against a southpaw,
a kid with catfish lips
and greased-back hair,
who had to be too stupid
to know any magic tricks. He lunged,
smote one at my neck.
I ducked. Then, either
that ball’s spin broke every law
I’d ever heard about or else
Morris County moved almost
a foot. I was out
by the cheapest trick the air
can pull—Bernoulli’s Principle.
Like “magic,” the common love songs
wail and are eager to repeat
it helplessly, magic, as if to say
what else can I say, it’s magic,
which is the stupidest of words
because it stands for nothing,
there is no magic. And yet
what other word does the heartbroken
or the strikeout victim have
to mean what cannot be and means what is?