After shocking the baseball world in '85, the Mets phenom disappeared. But recent reports suggest he may be planning a dramatic return
Sports Illustrated
Issue Date: July 31, 2000
by Mark Hofmann
The vast majority of Sports Illustrated's longtime readers undoubtedly remember exactly what they were doing when they opened up the April 1, 1985, issue and read about Sidd Finch, the English-born kid with the 168-mph fastball who had joined the New York Mets at their spring training camp in St. Petersburg the month before. Because of the date on the magazine's cover many readers felt that 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 that his hard work, his hound's nose for digging up the astonishing facts, his breaking through the walls of silence that the Mets had constructed around their phenomenon and his chance to win prestigious journalism awards were now all 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!"
Finch himself was apparently not bothered in the slightest by SI's decision to deny his existence. By all accounts, especially those from within the Mets organization, he was so withdrawn and shy as to be almost invisible.
For those not aware of Finch or the commotion he caused, a short word or so of explanation: Carrying a French horn, Sidd (two d's to honor Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism) had turned up at the Mets' training camp in the spring of 1985 for a tryout as a pitcher. English-born, he had spent a few years in a Tibetan monastery where, through a science called Lung-Gom, he had learned to throw an object at a target with extraordinary velocity and accuracy--a skill that he evidently had used during his monastery years to peg stones at snow leopards coming down out of the rhododendron forests to prey on the yaks in their pens. Quite naturally Finch began to wonder if there were not a more efficacious use for his talents, and with some misgivings he had come to America to try a baseball career.
Not long after Finch arrived at the Mets' camp, Mel Stottlemyre, then the team's pitching coach, used a Jugs radar gun to measure the prospect's fastball. To Stottlemyre's astonishment the readout said 168 mph, more than half again as fast as any pitcher had ever thrown a ball. The Mets realized that they had a revolutionary--if strange and idiosyncratic--force in their midst. One of Finch's more startling mannerisms was his habit of pitching with his left foot bare, an odd sight to see: his toes poised high in the air as he arched his back in his windup. This technique was apparently used to achieve the delicate balance required of his fearsome delivery.
SI's April 1 article went to the press before Finch had actually pitched in a game. Inexplicably the pitcher (described by one awed witness as "a guy who could throw a strawberry through a locomotive") left the Mets' training camp and baseball, one rumor being that he had fallen in love with a young Duke dropout named Debbie Sue Palmer. Finch soon began to fade from public consciousness.
Several years later, however, in part because of concerns that the wrong decision had been made at the 1985 staff meeting (and ultimately fearful of a scandal, as inevitably results from such a cover-up) SI decided to reopen the matter and begin new research as to the whereabouts of Finch. In the summer of 1994 the magazine contacted its stringers around the world and asked them to send what information they could find about the would-be pitcher.
One early report, oddly, came in from Beaver, Okla., where the annual World Cow Chip Throwing Championships are held. The officials there keep careful records. In 1979 Leland Searcy flung a chip 182' 3'', the longest throw since the event began in 1970. In '94 (so the report goes) a stranger appeared at the judging table as the afternoon of hurling cow chips was coming to a close and politely asked if he could compete. Tom Jakes, one of the judges contacted by SI, remembers the man as a "gangling sort of fellow, cowboy build," except he spoke with what Jakes took to be an "Eastern" accent. "He said he was kind of curious about what was going on and wanted to try," Jake recalls. "I asked if he had ever flung a chip, and he said he hadn't. Well, we don't like to have amateurs fooling with cow ships slinging unless they know what they're doing. You don't want one of those things fired into the crowd. There's skill involved."
Apparently the stranger persuaded the judges to let him try. What then occurred rendered just about all the witnesses speechless. The stranger stepped up, took off one boot, hefted a cow chip gently, getting the feel of it, and then in a whirlwind motion, one bare foot high in the air, let it fly. "Looked like a golf ball going off into the distance," Jakes recalls. "Went over Tom McGrew's barn down t' far end of the field and out into his cow pasture. Lot of other cow chips out there, so we never did figure out which one was the stranger's, but he'd doggone thrown that thing farther than the length of a football field!
"A lot of people got mad, in particular Leland Searcy, who had the record. The feeling was that this fella must've doctored the cow chip--put a solid object in there of some kind, bolts or something, because there is no way in tarnation that a cow chip can go that distance."
The Beaver officials were so unbelieving of the mystery man's astonishing toss (SI is certain that it was Finch, because of his habit of removing one shoe) that they disallowed it. "I felt sort of sorrowful seeing that stranger walk off into the sunset," Jakes told SI. "It could have been the greatest thing that ever happened in Beaver, but the way people reacted he's lucky he didn't get ridden out of town on a rail. Folks thought he was making a mockery out of our cow chip contest, said he was one of them pariahs. What made me feel better about him leaving that way was he had this fine-looking young woman with him who was wearing a red cowboy hat with a feather stuck in it. She was holding him around the waist as they walked out of town."
SI's editors theorized that Finch might have returned to England, his native country, and suspected that, given his extraordinary throwing ability, he might have given cricket a try. Evidently, as the magazine was able to discover, he did so four years ago with a village team in Staffordshire. Simon Darrell III, a local cricket authority, remembers the afternoon.
"Only saw him that one day," says Darrell. "Flint, was it? Oh, Finch! Yes. Of course. Extraordinary chap. Interesting situation. Absolutely deadly. Chippy Collins positively white-faced when he went to the wicket to face him. Trouble with Finch was, couldn't bowl the ball properly. The arm has to be absolutely stiff. Can't bend the elbow. We call that 'chucking.' Quite illegal, and the umpire calls out, 'No ball.'
"Chap only wore one shoe. Never saw a man run up to the wicket wearing only one shoe. Reminded me a bit of Fiery Fred Truman, England's fast bowler. They say Jeff Thompson, that Australian hippie chap with the big flop of hair, was the fastest, just under 160 kilometers an hour, but I would say this fellow--Finch, was it?--was much faster. You couldn't see the ball. Hard to believe. Like a rifle shot hit the stumps, bails flying all over the place, but always the umpire calling out, 'No ball.' 'No ball.' 'No ball.' Quite sad, really. Leggatt, the captain, finally took him off, put him out at third man at the boundary, ignominious fielding position out there, only for chaps who can't catch anything hit their way. The rains came just before tea. Smashing American girl was with him. Wore a T-shirt that said BOOM BOOM on the front."
Darrell sent SI an interesting note a few days later. "May I add this," he wrote. "Frankly, Finch did not seem to me to be 'chucking it.' With that arm windmilling that fast, it was hard to tell whether the elbow was bent. The thought crossed my mind that everyone around the grounds that afternoon just thought that it would be best if he were no seen there again. Not good for the game."
The cricket episode happened in 1996. There were no confirmed reports after that, merely rumors. Finch was variously said to be living quietly in the large London town house he had inherited from his father, sporting on the beaches of Fiji with a breath-taking blonde, coaching astronauts on weightlessness for trips to space. One rumor suggested he had returned to a monastic life in Bhutan. But SI is now of the opinion that some episodes reported in recent weeks by its correspondents in England suggest that Finch is engaging in new athletic pursuits.
Item: On the 3rd of February, Mrs. Julia Applegate of Sussex reported to the police that while knitting in the parlor on the second floor of her home, what appeared to be a cannonball burst through a window in a splinter of glass shards and rumbled across the floor, knocking over a birdcage stand. Mrs. Applegate, who had just put down a memoir of the Duke of Wellington to take up her knitting, shouted, "Napoleon!" (this by her account), apparently under the impression the French army was attacking the neighborhood.
Item: Quite nearby on the following day, Cynthia Bosworth, a schoolteacher, was walking with her grandmother in a fen when, with a slight whisper, a spear embedded itself in the turf not a yard away. The grandmother looked skyward and evidently (this according to her granddaughter) harking back to the days of the German air raids, remarked, "Goodness, what will they think of dropping on us next!"
Item: Last spring, in the Staffordshire village of Rugeley, at a pub named The Hat and Hounds, a game of darts was in progress. A stranger entered the premises with a striking young woman whose accent no one could identify. She kept egging her companion on to join the game and eventually, somewhat wearily, he agreed. The scoring had to be explained to him.
A witness, Time Bonds, reported what occurred next: "Ere's wha' 'appens. Nobody like 'im ever 'ere at the 'At an' 'Ounds!" Bonds went on to say that the stranger, a thinnish bloke in his early 40s, reared back, one leg high toward the ceiling, cocked his arm and snapped it forward with such force that the dart went deep into the board. The pub's strongman, a sheet-metal worker named Nick Fairchild, had to brace himself with two feet against the wall to try to dislodge the embedded dart. In fact, in doing so, he pulled the entire dartboard off its moorings, falling backward onto a table. While this was going on, the stranger and the young woman left the pub and were never seen again in the village.
Item: A second spear materialized in the wall of a porch in Staffordshire, where four ladies in a bridge club were playing a hand. Recalls Mrs. Forrest MacLeod, "I had just raised my partner's heart bid to three, holding four of her suit to the jack-10 along with some outside help, when suddenly there was the thud of a projectile going into the wall above our heads. Charlene Smith to my left passed, and my partner bid a small slam in hearts, which she made, and we won the rubber. Very satisfactory."
The Staffordshire police looked into each of the odd occurrences. It was discovered that the cannonball that landed in Mrs. Applegate's parlor was actually an iron ball of the type thrown by shot-putters and that the two spears were, in fact, javelins used in track meets. When the report was published in a local newspaper, an alert SI reporter, vacationing nearby, went to the police station. He learned that near Mrs. Applegate's home the police had found a lone hiking boot with the carefully lettered initials SF on the heel. The police had brought the boot into the station more in the interest of groundskeeping than of linking it to the shot or the javelins. The SI reporter, however, made the connection: Sidd Finch! His assumption was that Finch had hurried from the scene, leaving his boot behind in his haste, worried about discovery and surely too embarrassed to retrieve his errant shot from Mrs. Applegate's parlor.
The SI reporter asked to see where the police had found the boot. Taken to the spot, he measured the distance to Mrs. Applegate's window: approximately 105 feet, more than a third again as far as Randy Barnes's 1990 world-record shot toss of 75' 10¼"! So the questions hang in the air: Is Finch dabbling in various field events, perhaps even contemplating a run at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney? (As it happens, Great Britain's Olympic track and field trials are being held August 12-13 in Birmingham; so convinced are the magazine's editors that Finch will show up--even though he is not technically eligible to compete--that they are sending a writer and three photographers to await his arrival.)
SI contacted Robert Temple (author of a sketchy 1987 book also titled The Curious Case of Sidd Finch), who has followed Finch's travels as best he could. The magazine apprised Temple of what its operatives has recently learned. Temple is convinced that Finch is preparing for the Sydney Olympics. "He has this extraordinary gift," Temple says of Finch, "this astonishing arm. He would surely wish to utilize it, as he once did by playing baseball."
Moreover, Temple thinks that Finch's girlfriend, Ms. Palmer, "will press Sidd to go to Sydney and unleash his talents, suggesting, for example, that if Finch wows the Australians at the Games, the newspapers will begin referring to the city as Siddney. Irresistible!"
Temple believes that Finch will concentrate on the javelin. The shot is a comparatively brutish instrument compared to the lean, aesthetic lines of the javelin. More importantly, the highlands of Tibet, where Finch had his schooling in Lung-Gom, are where the ancient spear-throwing implement known as the atlatl (a slinglike device strapped to the arm and used to great effect for hunting) is thought to have been developed. "Finch is a traditionalist," Temple says. "The javelin would appeal to him."
Oddly, the biggest problem facing Finch stems from the prodigious distance he can hurl an object. His heaves would almost certainly sail well beyond the confines of any Olympic venue. Temple's theory is that Finch can only throw an object at top velocity (remember the dartboard episode), that any diminution of his motion would throw the whole apparatus off-kilter. "Finch has great control," Temple says, "but he can't control distance." Temple is reminded of the adage of the golfing gorilla, who is handed a driver and hits a ball 503 yards to the green. Once there, he is handed a putter, looks down at the ball and hits it 503 yards.
Because of this problem Temple's notion is that Finch is learning to throw the javelin in a high arc, with the trajectory of a mortar shell, so that it will come down and stick in the ground far enough away to win a gold medal but not so far as to cause controversy or disbelief, much less injuries in the stands. This would explain the odd phenomenon of a javelin descending vertically out of the heavens and startling Cynthia Bosworth and her grandmother in the Staffordshire fen.
Recently, on the off chance that George Plimpton had been in touch with Finch since writing the original article, and might be able to add to Temple's speculations, SI telephoned Plimpton in New York City. The call was placed somewhat tentatively, since Plimpton had been dropped from the magazine in 1991 for embroidering his stories with what Mark Twain used to refer to as "stretchers."
"What do you want?"
SI explained its hope to find out more about Finch, specifically about his intentions to put in an appearance at the Sidney Olympics.
"The what?"
"The Olympics."
"You've found out about the javelins?"
After a pause, and only slightly less acidly, Plimpton said, "Well, I had Sidd's phone number in London. I call it on occasion. There's never any answer. But the other day I called and it was busy."
And he said no more.
