Baseball and April Fools, it is a nice combination. Yours truly also posted some April Fools Jokes in the past. This story is about an April Fools’ joke published by a major sports magazine backed by the New York Mets.
In early 1985, Mark Mulvoy, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, noticed that a cover date that year would fall on April 1. He asked George Plimpton to commemorate this with an article on April Fools’ Day jokes in sports. When Plimpton couldn’t find enough examples to create an article, Mulvoy gave Plimpton permission to write his own hoax.
Plimpton came up with Hayden Siddhartha “Sidd” Finch, a rookie baseball pitcher in training with the New York Mets after he was discovered in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
The article wanted to make readers believe that Finch could throw a fastball at an amazing 168 miles per hour (270 km/h), far above the record of 104 miles per hour (167 km/h), with pinpoint accuracy, and this without warming up.
Pehaps the biggest gimmick of the article was the story that Finch only wore one shoe, a heavy hiker’s boot, when pitching. According to the article, Finch had never played baseball before and had to decide whether he would go for a sports career or one in playing the French horn. The Mets’ scouting report gave Finch a “9” on fastball velocity and control, where 8 is the highest score on that scale.
Plimpton wrote that Finch grew up in an English orphanage and was adopted by an archaeologist who later died in a plane crash in Nepal. After briefly attending Harvard University, he went to Tibet to learn “yogic mastery of mind-body” under “the great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa”, which was the source of his pitching prowess. Finch decided not to pursue a baseball career but chose to “play the French horn instead.
The story was accompanied by photographs of Finch, including one featuring a young Lenny Dykstra and another of Finch talking with the Mets’ actual pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre. The Mets played along with the hoax, even providing a uniform and number (21) for the fantasy player.
The story was released late March 1985. The subhead of the article read: “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball.” The first letters of these words spell out “Happy April Fools’ Day
New York Mets fans were in awe, having a talented player like this in their farm system. A New York sports page editor complained to the Mets’ public relations director for allowing Sports Illustrated to break the news.
The Mets gave Finch a locker between George Foster and Darryl Strawberry. The three major networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, and the local St. Petersburg, Florida, newspapers sent reporters to Al Lang Stadium for a press conference about Finch. At the April 2 press conference, Joe Berton, who personified Finch, announced his retirement.
The joke continued for two more weeks. On April 8, Sports Illustrated published an (much smaller) article about the retirement of Finch, and on April 15, they announced it was a hoax.
Plimpton eventually wrote a novel about this hoax: The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, first published in 1987. The book discussed Finch’s “brief re-commitment to baseball”, in which stories of Sadaharu Oh and Steve Dalkowski, as well as Finch’s girlfriend, inspire Finch to stick with baseball, and he reaches Major League Baseball with the Mets.
In April 2015, ESPN released a documentary on its 30 for 30 Shorts program about the Sidd Finch phenomenon, as “another April Fools’ joke for a new generation.”
Thirty years later, on August 15, 2015, the Mets’ (then) Low A farm team Brooklyn Cyclones, gave away a Sidd Finch bobblehead. Plimpton’s son Taylor threw out the first pitch as his father had passed away in the meantime. Joe Burton was giving autographs on that night.
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