curveball

Etymology

From curve +‎ ball.

Noun

curveball (plural curveballs)

(baseball) A forespin pitch thrown by rotating the index and middle fingers down and resulting in motion down "curve"
Synonyms: (slang) curve, (slang) deuce, (slang) yakker

He bit on a curveball in the dirt.
- 2025 June 11, “White Sox pitching prospect Grant Taylor makes jump from Double-A to perfect major league debut”, in The Associated Press‎:
  Cam Smith bounced to shortstop on a 100 mph fastball, and Jacob Melton also grounded out on an 86.9 mph curveball.
- 2025 June 6, Joe Harris, “Royals rookie Jac Caglianone gets first career hit and RBI”, in The Associated Press‎:
  Caglianone ripped Miles Mikolas’ curveball into the right-field corner for an RBI double that scored Salvador Perez in the fourth inning of the first game of a doubleheader against the Cardinals.
(by extension, chiefly US) An unexpected turn of events initiated by an opponent or chance; an exception or outlier.
Synonym: twist

Life has thrown him a few curveballs.
- 2015 March 10, David Sims, “Without Sam Simon, 'The Simpsons' Wouldn't Be What It Is Today”, in The Atlantic‎:
  The season’s first episode, “Bart Gets an F,” got the highest ratings in its history, but “Treehouse of Horror” was the real curveball: a genre-busting effort that proudly punched above the show’s expectations.
- 2016 December 6, Spencer Kornhaber, “The Culture Wars in the Grammy Album Nominations”, in The Atlantic‎:
  There are two curveball nominations, one perhaps a popularity bid and the other a credibility bid. The popular one is Bieber’s Purpose.
- 2017 June 13, Stephen Moss, “June likes to throw a curveball now and again”, in The Guardian‎:
  But from time to time, June throws up a curveball, in the shape of unusual and hard to predict meteorological events.
- 2021 June 11, Ezra Klein, “Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power” (32:37 from the start), in The Ezra Klein Show‎ (podcast), spoken by Sam Altman:
  And I think that’s an example of where faced with a seemingly intractable political reality, technology produces a solution that is a total curveball and not that imaginable a few decades ago.

Coordinate terms

(baseball): fastball, hardball, slider, cut fastball, two-seam fastball, split-finger fastball, sinker, screwball, softball, knuckleball

Derived terms

Translations

pitch in baseball

Catalan: llançament de corba (ca) m
French: balle courbe f
German: Curveball m
Japanese: カーブボール (kābubōru)
Korean: 커브볼 (keobeubol)
Portuguese: bola curva f
Spanish: bola curva f, ajuaishte m (football, tennis, El Salvador)

unexpected turn of events

Spanish: algo inesperado, algo no anticipado

Verb

curveball (third-person singular simple present curveballs, present participle curveballing, simple past and past participle curveballed)

(baseball) To throw a curveball.
- 2006, William F. McNeil, The Evolution of Pitching in Major League Baseball, McFarland, →ISBN, page 21:
  Even though the haughty physics professors at the elite school ridiculed his declaration that he could make a baseball curve, Cummings just laughed it off and said, “I curveballed them to death,” according to Frederick Ivor-Campbell.
- 2009, James Ellroy, Blood's a Rover, Random House, →ISBN, page 566:
  The news curveballed him. He'd been hamstrung and schizzed all the preceding weeks. He brooded in his den.

curveball

English