"In the version of the discovery most often heard, (Candy) Cummings developed the curved pitch after watching the erratic flights of clam shells picked up on a beach near his Brooklyn home and flung into the wind. Martin Quigley, in his book The Crooked Pitch (1984), quotes Cummings, somewhat fancifully, it seems: 'I thought what a wonderful thing it would be if I could make a baseball curve like that.' As the story goes, he started to experiment with the curve in games played among boys in the neighborhood, learning the way that finger pressure and wind direction had a great deal to do with the result." - Author Joseph M. Overfield in Baseball's First Stars (SABR, 1996)