FOOLED BYA FASTBALL
How Sports Illustrated, the Mets and ‘Sidd Finch’ got the best of baseball in 1985
The day the famous Sports Illustrated story about the Mets and a phenom pitcher hit newsstands, telephones all over New York and Florida started ringing. In Jay Horwitz’s office, a furious sports editor from a New York newspaper was on the line, loudly wanting to know why Horwitz, the Mets PR man at the time, would dare give such an amazing scoop to SI when the local papers covered the club every single day, from home runs to hamstring pulls.
In the Mets’ front office, the phones were jangling, too. Rival executives were calling their Flushing peers, saying, “What the heck is going on?” recalls Joe McIlvaine, then the Mets director of scouting. “‘Are you going to sign him?’ That was my favorite.
“That’s the nature of the business, though. If it had been another team, I might’ve called them, too.”
Even thenMLB Commissioner Peter Ueberroth got calls from GMs demanding the real story about the gangly righthander who purportedly threw a 168 mileper-hour fastball. How could this be?
Such was the immediate aftermath of perhaps the greatest sports joke ever told. “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” the George Plimpton article that became a sensation, ran in the April 1, 1985 editions of Sports Illustrated. It charmed many, infuriated some and still reverberates through the life of the former junior high art teacher who portrayed him.
The gag celebrates a birthday on Thursday, which, of course, is April Fool’s Day. It’s such a quirky bit of sports lore, we picked an oddball anniversary to look back at the pitcher who was part Yogi, part recluse and all fiction. Happy 36th, Sidd.
The story sounded bonkers: A 28-year-old Harvard dropout, a wanna-be mystic who had lived in Tibet and loved the French horn suddenly might want to pitch for the Mets, even with no baseball background? Finch claimed: “I have learned the art of the pitch.” He supposedly threw hard enough to make Nolan Ryan’s celebrated heater look like it detoured through molasses.
Finch pitched wearing one size-14 hiking boot — the other foot was bare — and his cap backward. The Mets, who were in on the joke, had him stashed at their spring training facility in St. Petersburg, throwing in secret in a canvas-covered enclosure.
Lane Stewart, the photographer who helped bring Finch to life with the memorable pictures that accompanied the Plimpton piece, never thought anyone would actually believe it. Heck, if you were clever enough to decode the first letter of each word in the story’s subhed, it spelled “Happy April Fool’s Day.”
Another ringing phone: Stewart had just gotten out of the shower the day the story hit. His wife, who worked at Life Magazine, was calling.
“How’s it look?” Stewart asked. “Really good. But, Lane, the sports editor of Life Magazine wants to know how to reach Sidd Finch.”
“Oh, (bleep),” Stewart replied. All these years later, Stewart adds: “It never occurred to me until that moment, standing there dripping wet, that anyone over the age of two would believe one damn word of that story. Every picture, the way I shot it, was almost designed to give it away.
“By the time I got to the office, the television trucks were parked out on 51st Street.”
The whole thing started when SI decided to pull an April Fool’s prank. Mark Mulvoy, then the managing editor, called then-Mets GM Frank Cashen to see if the club would play along. Horwitz, who loved the offbeat dating back to his days as a college sports information director, helped.
Plimpton crafted an intriguing backstory. Finch’s first name was Hayden, but he went by Sidd, which was short for Siddhartha, which, Plimpton wrote, means “Aim Attained” or “The Perfect Pitch.” He learned to throw his speedball in a place called Po, in the mountains of Tibet. Many more tidbits drew in readers, including the Mets asking a French horn virtuoso to evaluate Finch’s musical chops — the club was worried he preferred a career as a horn player.
Stewart got the assignment and immediately thought of his friend, Joe Berton. “When I was trying to figure out what I’d do, the visual of Joe hit me,” Stewart says. “No one looked more like Sidd Finch than Joe. A million people have asked me, ‘How did you make those feet look like that?’ Well, those feet are Joe’s.”
Sidd Finch, uh, Joe Berton is, of all things, a Cubs fan from Oak Park, Ill. He had assisted Stewart before and when Stewart called this time, his first thought was baseball: “That’s the competition!” Berton recalls. The ‘84 Cubs had won the NL East, but the Mets were dangerous up-and-comers.
Then Stewart said: “Guess what — you’re going to be Sidd.”
“I borrowed the French horn from the music teacher at school,” Berton says. “Another teacher gave me size-14 hiking boots. I went to Pier One to buy a rug and a food bowl.”
The two spent several days at Mets camp. Finch, who wore a No. 21 jersey, had a locker in between Darryl Strawberry and George Foster.
Years later, some Mets say they didn’t know what was going on. None of the players were fooled, says former pitcher Ed Lynch. But players knew something was up, with SI in camp and the hushhush atmosphere around Finch.
“He was a skinny guy,” Strawberry recalls. “A skinny guy can throw the ball that fast? There’s no way. Then you found out as we went along it was just a big joke.”
Still, there was plenty of convincing evidence about Finch, especially since Mel Stottlemyre, the Mets pitching coach, was widely quoted in Plimpton’s story and kept a marvelous poker face afterward.
“If one of the writers who covered the team walked by, Mel would ask me, ‘Doc, how’d you think Sidd Finch threw today?’” says Dwight Gooden.
“The more you talked about it, it sounded so good and they played it so well, I started to believe it myself,” Gooden adds. “I saw the guy down there. He had a pitcher’s build — tall and thin.
“At that time, and even afterward, family members would ask
me, ‘Whatever happened to Sidd Finch?’ I’d tell them he got hurt. Some of my family members, to this day, still think he exists.”
Once the piece ran, one of Berton’s students asked, “Does this mean you’re not going to be our teacher anymore?” Berton became a celebrity of sorts because folks wanted to hear the story behind the story.
Once, a Chicago TV station sent a crew to his house to clock Finch’s fastball. Berton hit the high 60s on the radar gun and quipped, “The 1 is burned out on your machine.”
In a few days, everyone knew it all wasn’t real. Berton later appeared in a faux press conference back at the Mets complex. Finch, he announced, wasn’t ready to chase a baseball career.
Some people, including a blustery Yankees owner, thought a trusted outlet like Sports Illustrated never should have indulged in such hijinks. George Steinbrenner called the caper “bad for baseball, bad for the Mets, bad for Sports Illustrated,” according to the magazine. Someone from Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s office called SI to see if it was true.
Berton still revels in his link to sports gag history, though. The Mets would leave Berton tickets when they’d play the Cubs. Once, he sat next to Lenny Dykstra’s mother. He’s been recognized as Sidd Finch while buying beer at the Wrigley Field concessions and asked to sign autographs, which he does as “Sidd Finch” or “Sidd Finch, aka Joe Berton.”
He was a guest at SI’s Sportsman of the Year banquet, riding in a limo with Brooks Robinson and Earl Weaver, who wanted to hear details. In 2015, he threw out the first pitch at the Brooklyn
Cyclones’ “Sidd Finch Night.” He loves hearing people talk about falling for the story or making up their own tales of meeting Finch while in Tibet.
Plimpton died in 2003, but he and Berton remained friends long after the piece. That was one of the things Berton loved best about being involved.
Now, not a year goes by without someone calling up Berton before April Fool’s Day to talk Finch.
“It’s a story that never dies,” adds Stewart. “There are a few things I’ve done that were maybe a little classier, but it’s one of the highlights of my career. They don’t do stuff like that anymore.”
Could it happen today? “Not with Instagram and Tik Tok and everything else,” Horwitz says. “You couldn’t keep the secret.” till, people seem to believe plenty of stuff on the Internet these days. That’s a whole different story, though.
“We need some humor,” says former Mets catcher Ed Hearn. “We need another Sidd Finch right now. I’m hoping someone’s got something good for April Fool’s.”
Maybe Sidd had a kid?
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