“Eddie Lopat is trying to teach Frank Hiller how to pitch a screw ball, or as the players say, ‘the old scroogie.’” New York Daily News, May 5, 1949, p79
Previous earliest use (Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd edition, 2009):
1ST USE. 1953. “Mickey Mantle coined a new word to describe the pitch he hit for [a] home run—‘It was some sort of a scroogie.’ [Preacher] Roe confirmed Mantle’s description: ‘It was a changeup screwball’” (Associated Press, Oct. 2; Harold Wentworth & Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang
