curveball

noun

1. 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.”

2. (US, broadly)An unexpected turn of events initiated by an opponent or chance; an exception or outlier.

   “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.”

verb

1. To throw a curveball.

   “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.”

   “The news curveballed him. He'd been hamstrung and schizzed all the preceding weeks. He brooded in his den.”