Master · 1928-1943 · left-handed
Carl Hubbell
The screwball master who struck out five Hall of Famers in a row — and deformed his own arm doing it.
Signature pitchScrewball
They called him King Carl and the Meal Ticket. Carl Hubbell threw the screwball, a pitch that breaks the wrong way, so well that in the 1934 All-Star Game he struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin in succession. The pitch fed him for a decade and left his throwing arm permanently turned, his palm facing outward at rest.
The signature pitch
A screwball thrown over the top with exactly the same motion as his fastball — the deception, he said, was not the break but the change of speed. To make it, he had to defy nature and twist his wrist to the right at release, so the ball broke down and to the left, away from a right-handed hitter. Years of that twist left his left palm facing out instead of in.
The same-motion delivery, the wrist twist, and the change-of-speed framing are from SABR; the palm-out deformity is confirmed by SABR and RetroSimba.
The mental edge
Matchless control, and a sequence built on it: he used the curveball to set up the screwball, so by the time the screwball arrived the hitter had already been moved off balance. It is why he could throw a backwards-breaking pitch for strikes in any count without giving the at-bat away.
“The screwball's an unnatural pitch. Nature never intended a man to turn his hand like that throwing rocks at a bear.”
The record
The 1934 All-Star Game is the legend: Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Simmons, and Cronin — five Hall of Famers, struck out in succession, after a single and a walk had put two men on with nobody out.
The career around the legend held up its end: two MVP awards, the second of them the first unanimous MVP the National League ever produced.
Across 1936 and 1937 he won twenty-four decisions in a row, a streak no pitcher has touched since.
The numbers live with the record-keepers.
The record is told here the way the rest of the atlas is told: in prose, each claim confidence-labeled and one click from its source. Where reputation and record disagree, the gap is shown, not smoothed over.