“An optical delusion,” replied the professor blandly.
“If a batter had been at the plate, he’d have broken his back reaching out after it,” Joe came back at him. “He wouldn’t have thought it was an optical delusion.”
“My dear sir,” said the professor smoothly, “the first law of motion is that a body set in motion tends to move in a straight line. Neither you nor anybody else can change that law. You might as well tell me that you can shoot a gun around a corner as that you can throw a ball around a corner.”
“I can throw it around the corner,” maintained Joe stoutly. “Not at right angles, of course, but I can make the ball go into the side street.”
The theorist smiled in a way that was exceedingly irritating. But Joe, by a great effort, mastered his annoyance.
“We won’t quarrel over it, Professor,” he remarked good-naturedly. “All I can say is that I must be getting my salary under false pretences, because the men who pay it to me do so under the impression that I can curve the ball. I’ve always had that impression myself, and so have the batters who have faced me. Rather odd, don’t you think, that so many people should be so misled?”
“Not at all,” replied the professor pompously. “Truth is usually on the side of the minority.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Joe thoughtfully. “I know a moving picture operator, who’s an old friend of mine and who’d be glad, if I asked him, to do me a favor. I’ll get him to come down some day and take a picture of the ball in motion. Then we’ll study out the film and I think I can prove to you that the ball does curve on its way from the pitcher to the catcher.”
“How do you think you could prove anything from that?” asked Professor Crabbe cautiously, as though he were looking for a trap. “They can work all sorts of tricks with moving pictures, you know.”
“I know they can,” admitted Joe. “But this would be ‘honest Injun.’ You’d have my word of honor and the operator’s, too, that there’d be no monkeying with the pictures.”