Still curious about Sidd Finch
(Lane Stewart /Sports Illustrated)
It's listed on the website MuseumofHoaxes.com as No. 2 on the list of the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time.
Thanks to the operational function of the new SI Vault, we're able to revisit a story by George Plimpton that came out in Sports Illustrated on this date 23 years ago.
And it wasn't even the cover story.
That was reserved for a piece on the three Big East teams that had made it to the Final Four: Georgetown (with Patrick Ewing), St. John's (with Chris Mullin) and VIllanova (with ... no one really ... Rollie Massamino?). You know the rest of that story. When Villanova knocked off Georgetown for the title on this day in 1985 as well, many thought it was an April Fool's joke.
That was reserved for this story on Sidd Finch.
"(He's) a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch," Plimpton wrote. "..."He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball."
And the Mets were hiding them in their spring training camp after the radar gun registered 168 on one of his pitches.
Again, thanks to this cool SI Vault, we're also able to access the July 31, 2000 issue -- one where they ask "What Ever Happened to ..." Finch surfaces again ... or at least, the follow up story.
Because of the date on the magazine's cover many readers felt they were being victimized by an April Fools' hoax. More than 2,000 of them wrote letters, some of them extremely angry at the magazine's decision to do such a thing.
The editors were startled, to put it mildly. At a hastily called meeting of the top brass, it was decided to go along with the public's assumption that the whole thing was a charade; the magazine would deny that Sidd Finch ever existed.
This was extremely upsetting to George Plimpton, the author of the article (The Curious Case of Sidd Finch), who complained bitterly that his hard work, his hound's nose for digging up the astonishing facts, his breaking through the wall of silence that the Mets had constructed around their phenomenon and his chance to win prestigious journalism awards were all now to be callously dismissed and the story written off as an elaborate practical joke. "You're knuckling under, caving in to public opinion!" Plimpton shouted at the staff meeting. "Shame! Shame! Puppets!"
In 1987, the story came out in book form, and went to paperback with in a couple of printings. So, if it's in a book, it must be true.
And the trivia part of this:
Sidd Finch was played by Joe Berton, a mild-mannered junior high school art teacher who lived in Illinois.