Ice-cream (sort of) from the seventies and eighties. Imagine an upturned Dalek (on a much smaller scale, obviously) made of plastic and fill it full of ice-cream with a kind of strawberry sauce. It was eaten with a small wooden shovel. The name 'Screwball' came from the fact that right at the bottom, where the head of the Dalek would have been, was a chewing-gum ball, a hard candy-shelled thing. Is this what the majority of people felt they wanted to eat after noshing on an ice-cream? Or was it just a gimmick? - Call me a cynic, but...

After the success of the Screwball had waned, they came out with the 'Two-ball Screwball': you can probably guess what else they'd added to it to warrant the name. What on earth would an ice-cream consumer do with two pieces? They could eat one, sure. But where would they put the other, all covered with ice-cream as it was? The feminine rhyme of 'Two-ball Screwball' is all very well - but should it really dictate marketting policy? No doubt this shouldn't distress me as much as it does...

I have no idea why either variant was popular, mind you - in essence it's just a wafer cone with vanilla ice-cream and strawberry sauce (and the brilliance of the wafer cone, of course, is that you can eat all of the product - there's no plastic kicking about for the rest of the life of the planet (mind you - who cared about that in the 70s and 80s?)). And with a Screwball you can't eat the cone afterwards. Or push all the ice-cream to the bottom with your tongue until it squirts out of the end. Or snap off the end and use the resulting small cone to scoop up a little bit of the ice-cream and make mini ice-cream cones.

All the taste and fun of an ice-cream cone. Without the fun...

A screwball (or "scroogie," as it is affectionately known), is a pitch in baseball that breaks sharply to right when thrown by a right-handed pitcher and sharply to the left when thrown by a lefty. Although often thought of as the reverse of a curveball the motion of a screwball is usually more comparable to the motion of a reverse slider, and screwballs are often thrown with a different grip than the curveball.

The best way to picture how a screwball is thrown is to grasp a doorknob with your right hand. Turn the doorknob sharply to the left. That is how it feels for a righty to throw the screwball.

New York Giants legend Christy Mathewson is credited with inventing the screwball, which he called the "fadeaway."

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.