pictures Stern occasionally appeared in feature films as himself. Two of his more familiar credits are The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper, and Here Come the Co-Eds, starring Abbott and Costello. He also narrated a long-running series of 10-minute short subjects for Columbia Pictures, "Bill Stern's World of Sports." He also served as sports commentator for News of the Day newsreels, as he acknowledged in his signoff message on his Colgate Shave Cream Sports Newsreel of the Air over NBC Radio ("Until then, I'll be seeing you in the News of the Day newsreel at your favorite Loews or Associated theaters!"). The character "Bill Kern" in Woody Allen's "Radio Days" was a take on Stern's storytelling. Controversies He caused a controversy on September 15, 1944, when he reported that a Chicago newspaper had broken word of some sort of arrangement for the St. Louis Browns of baseball's American League to lose their only World Series that year. He later expressed regret about writing the article; the Browns did lose the World Series that year, 4 games to 2, to their hometown rivals on their home field, Sportman's Park, which the Browns owned, but shared with the St. Louis Cardinals. One day, while doing radio play-by-play for a football game, as a player broke away towards a long run for a touchdown, Stern misidentified the runner several times as he ran toward the goal. Noticing the error just before he crossed the goal line, Stern "corrected" himself by saying that the misidentified runner had lateraled the ball to the player who actually made the run and scored. Sometime later, Clem McCarthy, that era's most prominent horse-racing announcer, described the wrong horse as having won a race. When the verbose and egotistical Stern chided him for this error, McCarthy replied, "You can't lateral a horse, Bill." Bill Stern on the curveball In 1949, Stern waded into "The Great Curveball Debate" about who invented the curveball in the 19th century, Candy Cummings or Fred Goldsmith. In his book of that year, Bill Stern's Favorite Baseball Stories, he came down solidly in Goldsmith's corner: "Some 80 years ago, an obscure kid pitcher on the Connecticut sandlots made a discovery that revolutionized baseball. He discovered that he could perform an amazing trick. He could actually pitch a baseball in such a way as to make it curve! In 1870, before a large but