Spring feigning
He's Utterly Mystical: Baseball's Uber Guy
"He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent lifestyle, Sidd's deciding about yoga--and his future in baseball." So meandered the subhead of a 1985 Sports Illustrated story, a 14-page profile of 28-year-old rookie pitcher Hayden "Sidd" Finch. The English-born Buddhist had showed up at the New York Mets training camp in Florida to try out. Though he'd never played organized baseball before, he could throw a baseball 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy--65 mph faster than the fastest pitch ever recorded. The young mystic said he'd learned "the art of the pitch" in Tibet, where he'd mastered the ability to deflect "the huge forces of the universe into throwing a baseball with bewildering accuracy and speed." He refused to wear cleats, pitching instead with a hiking boot on one foot and the other one bare "for balance." The story, penned by New Journalism pioneer and Paris Review editor George Plimpton, was accompanied by photos of a gangly fellow in a Mets uniform, hanging around with his teammates.
When Finch's superhuman stats hit newsstands, SI's offices were bombarded by calls from excited readers who apparently didn't catch on to the acronymic subhead. The magazine received nearly 2,000 letters, the highest volume in its history (with the possible exception, concedes Plimpton, of early swimsuit issues). New Yorkers especially went wild, he says, "probably because they thought they'd stumbled on a pennant winner."
Speculation about Finch ran rampant for several days, but SI kept mum. A week later, however, the magazine ran a follow-up: Finch announced at a press conference that he'd lost his touch and would not be pursuing a baseball career. Most major newspapers treated the stories as hoaxes and called for disclosure. Even so, a Chicago radio DJ claimed he'd seen Finch pitch, and a Florida paper sent two reporters to the Mets camp to meet the mysterious ballplayer. On April 15, SI editors came clean. The story, which ran in their April 1 edition, was a hoax.
Plimpton was originally commissioned to write about great sports hoaxes, the dearth of which prompted SI's gambit. When he came up empty-handed, his editor said, "George, do your own." It was the realistic photos, says Plimpton, that made the tale so plausible. "Sidd" was actually a Chicago schoolteacher, and the Mets were in on the charade. Like all baseball legends, Finch endures. SI still occasionally publishes a Sidd-sighting, and Plimpton wrote a book, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, which he refuses to call fiction.
This story appears in the August 26, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.