Curve Ball: The Rise and Fall of John Ringelski

On the mound, “Curve Ball” Ring was a menace to opposing hitters. Off the field, he was a menace to just about everyone else.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED AUGUST 6, 2025

“I have a dozen other wives better than you!”

That's what John Ringelski screamed at his wife on a night in 1916 during another one of the disputes that had become commonplace during their rocky six-year marriage. They were in the midst of their third reconciliation after their third separation, but the old demons were back, and the man's wife recognized them right away. The demons were red-faced like her husband, and they were just as drunk as she was.

She hoped they weren't armed.

The dispute was the kind of explosion that the neighbors and police had gotten used to, and someone nearby must have had the good sense to call this one in before it got out hand. It was a kind of standard procedure for the man they used to call Curve Ball Ring, a name that, depending on the day, meant that you were in for either nine innings of brilliance or a headline in the next day's crime blotter.

Curve Ball was an Industrial League pitching god in a city filled with factories that never slept but always shut down long enough to watch the company team's ballgames. Ringelski could bend a baseball like a magician, and he delighted in the way the crowds would cheer him after each flailing strikeout. But when the game was over and the lights went down, he was a walking misdemeanor. Maybe a felony if the night got weird enough.

South Bend had never seen anything like him. Thank God.

Tracking down the true life story of John Ringelski might be even more difficult than trying to catch up to his legendary curveball. Born in 1891 to a pair of Polish immigrants on South Bend's westside, Ringelski's early life is a mirage that's obscured by bad recordkeeping, shifting addresses, and a small pile of aliases — almost all of them accidental. Like most of his Polish relatives, Ringelski had to deal with an America that never had the patience to learn how to properly spell his name. In newspapers and on official government documents, Ringelski is spelled at least five different ways.

Maybe that's why he shortened it to Ring.

For the first twenty years of his life, Ringelski is a whisper and a rumor, never appearing in a newspaper until New Year's Eve, 1910 — the first time he was arrested for beating his first wife. It was less than a year into their marriage. The charges were ultimately dropped. The pair made up, and Ringelski promised to be better behaved in the future.

The promise didn't stick.

Ringelski was arrested for public intoxication in 1913. He admitted to hopping trains that same year. He went down in a watermelon theft the year after that.

That's just the trouble he got into while he was in South Bend. As for what he was doing the rest of the time, that's anyone's guess.

John Ringelski did not avoid the call of his country during the Great War. He trained as an early aviation mechanic and shipped off to France aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in February 1918. The newspaper ran a list of local enlisted men who had shipped out to join the conflict, and Curve Ball was right in the middle of the list:

John S. Ringelski, Private, First Class, Company A of the First Motor Mechanics Regiment

It was all normal and par for the course in wartime reporting. The only hiccup?

The newspaper was the Detroit Free Press, and as far as they were concerned, Ringelski was a native Detroiter.

Maybe it shouldn't have come as such a surprise. When he barked about his dozen other wives, Ringelski all but admitted to living a double life — and maybe several of them. Later recollections of Curve Ball's athletic exploits would indicate that he was a star pitcher for a semi-professional outfit in Detroit and that he was one of the finest football players in Michigan.

If there's any truth to those athletic legends, then Ringelski was performing them under a different name. There's no record of Ringelski — or any of his known aliases — achieving sporting glory in the Wolverine State.

But that doesn't mean he wasn't there.

There's a John Ring who turns up at a Detroit housefire in 1911. Another one in the middle of a drunken brawl in River Rouge in 1913. Another one missing and presumed drowned somewhere out on the Ecorse River in 1914. Each one of them was the same age as our Curve Ball Ring, except of course, our Curve Ball wasn't dead.

The demons that haunted John Ringelski didn't usually follow him onto the baseball field. By 1915, he was a sensation in South Bend, starring for the South Bend Singers — the company team at Singer Sewing Machine. Ringelski twirled a curveball that broke like a promise, and with the league's most powerful offense behind him, the Singers became a powerhouse, winning three city championships in 1913, 1914, and 1915. Curve Ball Ring was at the center of all of their biggest games, and in 1915, he dragged the squad to within one victory of a national championship.

But by the end of 1916, everything was about to unravel. There was the arrest and the infamous court appearance where he claimed his dozen wives. Ringelski struggled to control his fastball on the field, and he struggled to control his behavior off of it. By the end of the season, Ring had been relegated to the backend of the team's rotation, and the team had been relegated to last place in the league.

Come 1917, there would be no redemption. There would only be war.

South Bend's Industrial League shut down. Ring went to Europe.

At the war's end, Curve Ball returned to South Bend and fell into his oldest and nastiest habits. By 1921, he was arrested on a shocking menagerie of charges including child abandonment, wife desertion, and armed robbery. He pled guilty to the least serious of the charges — wife desertion — and was sentenced to spend 1-3 years in the State Penitentiary at Michigan City.

The South Bend Industrial League didn't return immediately after the war. Years passed. Players moved on. Factories changed hands. But in 1924 — seven years after the league went dark — it suddenly roared back to life, almost as if it had been waiting for Curve Ball Ring to come home.

Ringelski had served his time and was living as a free man again by Opening Day 1924. He came back from Michigan City a little quieter, a little more reflective, a little more reserved. They said prison had changed him. Or at least they hoped it had.

He got his job back at Singer. And then, just like that, he was back on the mound, this time with everything to prove. He spun a shutout in his first start of the season. He authored another one a week later. Word spread quickly throughout the city: Curve Ball Ring was back — and so was top-shelf baseball in South Bend.

His career had been derailed first by a war, a prison sentence, and most of all by his own bad decisions, but somehow, Curve Ball was back and better than ever. Crowds turned out, and for the first time in a very long time, John Ringelski heard the people cheering for him.

It was July 19, 1924. Curve Ball Ring was 33 years old and in the middle of the greatest hot streak of his career. The Singers were in first place, and the commissioner had just announced that the champs of the South Bend Industrial League would play for the National Championship in Detroit. John Ringelski recognized an opportunity to exorcise his demons in at least one more city before the year was over.

Fans poured into the stadium for a contest that the newspapers had anticipated for weeks — the Singers versus the Studebakers. A win would all but seal first place for the Singers. A loss and it would be a race. Studebaker was the largest company in town, but fans love an underdog, and the crowd was firmly behind the Singers that perfect summer day. John Ringelski trotted out to the mound, the same way he had ever since he was a kid on the sandlot — long before the days he'd made the choices that ruined his life.

For a moment on that sun-soaked Saturday, Curve Ball Ring forgot about all of his own dirty laundry. He forgot about the days spent in a prison cell. He forgot that his life had been kissed by a cursed temper that he never really tried to shake. Instead, he lingered just a moment before he delivered his first pitch, soaking in the adulation of the crowd. Then it was time for a deep breath, a windup, and a hard fastball that painted the outside corner.

The umpire called it a ball.

It was the first of many calls that left Ring shaking his head, but the hurler managed to keep his cool, and by the sixth inning, Ring was tethered to a 7-3 lead.

But it wasn't a comfortable lead. The Studebakers had loaded the bases with two outs. Ringelski had run up a full count on the man at the plate, but it was no matter. One more strike and the inning was over. The catcher called for a heater, but the hurler shook him off.

They call me Curve Ball.

The pitch came for the batter's face, making him flinch, freezing him in place. And then came the bend, the ball ducking and diving back toward the zone. By the time the hitter realized what was happening, it was too late. The bat stayed glued to his shoulder as the pitch floated toward the plate.

The umpire called it a ball.

Ball four.

Ring had walked in a run.

Without a word, Ringelski stepped off the mound and approached the umpire. There was no argument and there were no words, just a swift clean punch which resulted in a split lip and three loosened teeth for the man behind the plate.

Ring was ejected from the game and suspended from the league — for the rest of his life. The end of his redemption story came as quick as the Studebaker comeback. With Ringelski out of the game, the automakers ran up 11 runs in barely more than three innings to steal the contest from the Singers.

John Ringelski never threw another pitch that mattered. After the umpire hit the ground, so did Ring's career. He stayed on at Singer for a while — kept his head down, kept his job, and kept out of the papers. In 1927, he married again. This time, nobody got punched. There were kids. Later, grandkids. A life that at least looked like a normal portion of the American Dream.

The Singers won the league in 1924 without him. They hoisted the trophy without their ace, and nobody mentioned the curveball that got them there — or the one that didn't. It was like they all agreed to forget Curve Ball Ring, a pact that seemed to continue for the next 50 years.

Maybe Ringelski was trying to forget too. The memories of the awful and wonderful things his hands had done, the secrets he kept buried in Detroit, the smell of the inside of a prison cell, the horrors of war, the feeling of the perfect curveball that he'd never been able to throw again. In his later years, long after they stopped calling him Curve Ball, Ringelski was arrested several times for public intoxication — because those demons don't quit after the last inning.

John Ringelski died in 1972 at the age of 81. He is buried in the St. Joseph Cemetery.