And his 168 mph Heater
Google the wonderful story George Plimpton penned for Sports Illustrated called “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.”
Who threw a baseball 168 miles per hour. I kid you not. Not even a chuckle. One. Six. Eight. On the radar gun in 1985 with the New York Mets.
A boot, a bare foot and a blur
Here are just a few of the incredible, surreal epiphanies revealed by Plimpton.
Sidd was an orphan adopted by an English archaeologist who died in a plane crash in Nepal. He attended Harvard. Finch caressed the French horn so lovingly he could have performed with the New York Philharmonic.
He aspired to be a monk and studied yoga and the mastery of mind and body. Hence the name Hayden Siddhartha Finch. I won’t go into the Zen Esoterics because it would take a novel to unravel the Mystique. That’s between you and Buddha.
Suffice it to say Sidd Finch strengthened his arm catapulting rocks and meditating on the Rotator Cuff in the austere mountains of Tibet.
The great George Plimpton
How to vaporize a soda bottle
He was discovered by a Mets minor league manager who saw him throw a baseball with so much velocity it vaporized soda bottles. Yes, vaporized.
Finch said he’d learned the Art of the Pitch and that was as obvious as sunrise. Now the Mets are not stupid. Melting glass with solar heat is an automatic invitation to spring training. Even if you developed in the Tibetan Independent League.
They brought him to Florida and it didn’t take long, just one click of the Jugs gun, to see Mr. Finch not only threw 168 mph but also with surgical command.
And he did all this without even warming up. Just to escalate the Surreal Strangeness, he wore a hiker’s boot on his right foot and no shoe at all on his left.
Scouting reports go from 1 for abysmal to 8, which is Hall of Fame. The Mets rated Sidd’s velocity and command at 9. Not just off the charts but off the Grid.
Sidd was unsigned, of course, so the Mets kept him as secret as the formula for Coca Cola. He threw to a few hitters in a hidden batting cage constructed just for his clandestine bull pens.
But somehow the workouts leaked to Plimpton, who wrote a brilliant 14 page epic for SI, complete with pics of pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, his French horn, his locker in the clubhouse, his roommate at Harvard, and Siddhartha riding a camel in Egypt.
Yes, a camel in Egypt.
Mets outfielder John Christensen was one of the helpless hitters who felt like a human sacrifice when he faced Finch in the cage.
As he stepped into the box the catcher, Ronn Reynolds, who liked the letter “n” and also had a left palm crying out in agony, whispered, “Kid, you won’t believe what you’re about to see.”
See is decidedly the wrong word.
“You can barely see the blur as it goes by”
“Before you can blink the ball is in the catcher’s mitt,” Christensen said. “You hear it crack and then there’s this little bleat from Reynolds. You can barely see the blur as it goes by. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to hit it.”
When SI published the story it was as if an 8.5 quake had turned Shea Stadium into a World War II bomb site. Ecstatic Mets fans hungered for more info on this Hammer of Thor.
The media bit in to a feeding frenzy, one New York sports editor castigated PR man Jay Horwitz for giving SI the scoop, and a radio talk show host got in front of the story by proclaiming he’d seen Finch on the hill.
Two agitated GM’s confronted commissioner Peter Ueberroth. The hitters will be risking their lives standing in against a 168 mph fastball they can’t see.
The Mets were very undeterred. They gave Finch number 21, free rein to explore the St. Petersburg spring training complex, and a locker between George Foster and Darryl Strawberry.
“You don’t want me to sign this. You’ve got Gooden and Carter on here.”
Except Sidd Finch never existed.
Well, his imposter did. Call him a Baseball Forged Painting.
The whole thing was an April Fool’s prank engineered by SI editor Mark Mulvoy and Plimpton, best known for his book Paper Lion where he scrimmaged as a back-up quarterback with the NFL Detroit Lions.
Plimpton’s story was a masterpiece. Immaculate research combined with perceptive, lyrical prose by the Fred Astaire of the English language. If it was a forgery it would be a Rembrandt. ‘
Fourteen pages so convincing you knew it had to be straight goods because this is Sports Illustrated for God’s sake. Sure, 168 seems like an apparition blowing in the wind. But Why Not?
After all, the guy is a Buddhist, studying to be a monk, a bona fide, genuine mystic, an ascetic, his only possessions a rug and a food bowl.
And maybe, just maybe, he’s discovered the secret of Fast Twitch Muscle Transcendence, or Time Warp, or Koufax Perfection, or Yoga Levitation, or Yanni at the Taj Mahal, or Vodka. Hell, maybe he’s Captain Kirk.
So fans wanted to believe even when they knew it was a stretch about as far as Shea Stadium to the Dalai Lama’s winter home in Lhasa.
Ohmigawd, it’s Sidd Finch
In reality the embodiment of Sidd Finch was Oak Park, Illinois school teacher Joe Berton. He just happened to be a friend of SI photog Lane Stewart, the dude clicking shots as Berton, a gangly 6-4 who fit Plimpton’s image of Sidd like a clone, conversed with Stottlemyre and Lenny Dykstra.
And the Mets went along with the gag like Laurel and Hardy.
“Sidd Finch Lives!”
SI did not pursue the joke for long. Sidd Finch announced his retirement and got a standing ovation when he pontificated, “The perfect pitch, once a thing of harmony, is now an instrument of chaos and cruelty.”
A week later SI owned up to the hoax by pointing out the first letter of each word in the secondary headline spelled out Happy April Fools. I have no idea if anyone noticed that obscurity.
But you don’t K the Field of Dreams without a tenacious battle. It will hang in and foul off borderline pitches until you throw something down the middle. T-shirts and “Sidd Finch Lives!” bumper stickers popped up like weeds for a decade or more.
As for Joe Berton he was captivated by the hoax.
A New York Times story told it best. When Joe/Sidd retired his fans wouldn’t let go. “People started handing me baseballs to sign, and the first ball had Dwight Gooden and Gary Carter on it. I just looked up and said: ‘You don’t want me to sign this. You’ve got Gooden and Carter on here.’ They said: ‘No, Sidd, sign it! Please?’ So I put ‘Sidd Finch’ on it, and kept walking down the line signing autographs.”
His wife Gloria says, “He absolutely loves it. Even now, at parties, people will go by and say, ‘Hey, you’re Sidd Finch!’
People want to believe, no matter how much proof they have to the opposite. Maybe we have to hold on to our dreams. But sometimes it can also be dysfunctional. I’ll have to work on that one.
So Sidd Finch doesn’t really exist. Or does he? Maybe he’s just as real as anyone I write about. Or just as unreal. Maybe they’re all in my imagination. Or yours. Take your pick.
Is that existential enough for you?
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