Just between us, I was tipped off to a pitch the other day.
No, not by the Astros or Red Sox.
This pitch came from a kind reader named Mike, who shared a different kind of baseball story.
The story of an antebellum Toledo mansion, the Hall of Fame giant who once lived there, and one of the hottest properties on the real estate market.
Was I interested?
Well, let me check my ... wait, what?
The tale begins with the recent listing of the home at 1022 N. Superior St., a three-story, eight-bedroom, three-bath Victorian in the historic Vistula neighborhood.
A Lucas County Land Bank property, it is priced to sell at $12,888, but, as you would expect, it’s a real handyman special. Listing agent Emory Whittington said — while its bones are healthy — the unoccupied 163-year-old home will require at least $100,000 in basic work.
No matter.
In 29 years as a real estate agent, Whittington has never seen more interest in a property, mostly from those who spotted it on a website for enthusiasts of old houses and had designs on the deal of the century.
“I’ve gotten 100 calls, from Australia, Hawaii, California,” Whittington said. “They don’t realize the fine print. It’s a renovation project!”
As it is, there are three offers, pending approval by the Land Bank, which will only sell to a buyer interested in properly restoring the home.
The whole thing is fascinating.
Yet, what most got our attention was another line in the fine print.
Was once the William Candy Cummings house.
As in Candy Cummings, the 19th-century pitcher who invented the curveball and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.
If I can’t say the name rang a bell, here was as good of an excuse as any to explore a fun Toledo connection to history.
Turns out, Cummings spent his final years in the home, living there with his son until his death in 1924 at age 75.
What a yarn those walls could spin.
I suppose they would start with a day at the beach in Brooklyn, N.Y.
A curious 14-year-old named William Arthur Cummings and his buddies were hurling sea shells into the ocean .
“In the summer of 1863, a number of boys and myself were amusing ourselves by throwing clam shells (the hard shell variety) and watching them sail along through the air, turning now to the right, and now to the left,” Cummings wrote in Baseball Magazine. “We became interested in the mechanics of it and experimented for an hour or more. All of a sudden, it came to me that it would be a good joke on the boys if I could make a baseball curve the same way.”
And so he went to work.
Long before there was Sandy Koufax and Bert Blyleven and Doc Gooden and the curveball became as fundamental of a baseball ingredient as peanuts and Cracker Jacks, there was a kid and his imagination.
An avid player of the growing schoolyard game, Cummings became consumed by the quest, experimenting with different releases and grips, often to the eye rolls of his classmates.
“My boy friends began to laugh at me,” he wrote, “and to throw jokes at my theory of making a ball go sideways.”
Steadily, though, he began to work his magic.
And, by 1867, his wrist-snapping creation was ready. Cummings, then the ace of the Brooklyn Excelsiors amateur team, made the big reveal in a game at Harvard.
“I began to watch the flight of the ball through the air and distinctly saw it curve,” he wrote. “A surge of joy flooded over me that I shall never forget. I felt like shouting out that I had made a ball curve. I wanted to tell everybody; it was too good to keep to myself."
Throwing sidearm as the rules of the day required, Cummings and his new pitch became a hit. What he lacked in size and power — he would grow to be 5-9, 120 pounds — he offset with his great equalizer of an offering. Teammates called him “Candy,” a popular Civil War-era nickname for men who were experts at their craft.
Cummings went on to pitch four years in the National Association — where he averaged a cool 445 innings per season in the first professional league — then joined the start-up National League. He went 18-6 for the Hartford Dark Blues in 1876 and 5-16 for the Cincinnati Reds in 1877 before arm trouble ended his pro career.
Cummings retired to Athol, Mass., where he and his wife, Mary, raised five children and he opened a paint and wallpaper shop. After his wife passed, he moved to Toledo in 1920 to live with his son, Arthur.
As time went on, Cummings watched as more and more pitchers learned to master his invention, much to the dismay of the old guard.
Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, once famously said: “This year, I'm told the [Harvard] team did well because one pitcher had a fine curveball. I understand that a curveball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.”
But there was no turning back.
And Cummings’ legacy was secure, living on to this day.
From the halls of Cooperstown to an old house in Toledo.
First Published February 6, 2020, 11:05 p.m.
