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Pronunciation varies by accent · noun
(baseball) A forespin pitch thrown by rotating the index and middle fingers down and resulting in motion down "curve".
He bit on a curveball in the dirt.
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.
Cam Smith bounced to shortstop on a 100 mph fastball, and Jacob Melton also grounded out on an 86.9 mph curveball.
Life has thrown him a few curveballs.
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.
There are two curveball nominations, one perhaps a popularity bid and the other a credibility bid. The popular one is Bieber’s Purpose.
But from time to time, June throws up a curveball, in the shape of unusual and hard to predict meteorological events.
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.
Use curve ball when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Curve ball means (baseball) A forespin pitch thrown by rotating the index and middle fingers down and resulting in motion down "curve".
Common synonyms include curve, deuce, yakker, twist.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
He bit on a curveball in the dirt.
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