J. E. Lighter, the editor of the Random House Dictionary of American Slang, sez: "As the essayist and novelist Nicholson Baker has noted, the suffix -ball has become an important resource for the slangy smart-alecks of our time. Think of the belittling butterball, cheeseball, cornball, dirtball, goofball, hairball, nutball, oddball, sleazeball, slimeball, and weirdball. Most of these arrived well after mid-century, and in most the -ball element is only a metaphor. The spiritual progenitor of this burgeoning array of ball-bearing compounds, though, is undoubtedly a real ball -- the familiar screwball, first noted in print in 1928. Originally this designated the deceptive baseball pitch that breaks in a direction opposite to that of an ordinary curve ball. The screwball (similar to the earlier fadeaway) gained its nom de guerre largely through the efforts of Carl Hubbell, the left-handed Hall of Fame ace who pitched for the New York Giants from 1928 to 1943. The winner of twenty-four consecutive games stretching over the 1936 and 1937 seasons, Hubbell perfected his signature screwball in the minors; he remembered having a catcher in Oklahoma tell him the pitch was "the screwiest thing [he] ever saw." Shortly thereafter the descriptive screwball was bestowed on human beings -- people who display an unpredictable twist. The linguistic leap was made easy by the prior existence of screwy, which had the same connotation. Screwy derives from the nineteenth-century expression "having a screw loose"-- that is, "having something missing or defective," as in machinery ("There's a screw loose somewhere ..."). A screwy person habitually demonstrates eccentric or just plain nutty behavior. (English-speakers around the world love to come up with new ways to describe such people.)"

How about that?