

For a long time many baseball fans have insisted there is no such thing as a curve ball. They claim the curve is an optical illusion. But a pitcher named Fred Goldsmith proved that a ball does curve, and he performed his feat almost a hundred years ago.
At the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn, Goldsmith staked three poles into the ground in a straight line. Then he threw a pitch that passed to the right of the first pole, left of the second pole, and back to the right of the third pole.
In the old days of hockey, the referee had to place the puck on the ice between the sticks for a face-off. By the end of a game his hands and knuckles were often black and blue from the swishing hockey sticks. In 1914 all the referees breathed a sigh of relief. A new rule permitted them to drop the puck between the sticks of the face-off players.
From The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
A curveball does curve, but not as much as the hitter thinks. It is partly an optical illusion. I think it was Popular Mechanics that had an article on it.