THE CURIOUS CASEOF SIDD FINCH
by George Plimpton
Sports Illustrated
April 1, 1985
The secret cannot be kept much longer.Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets managementwill have to produce a statement. It may have started unraveling in St. Petersburg,Florida two weeks ago, on March 14th, to be exact, when Mel Stottelmyre, the Metpitching coach, walked over to the 40-odd Met players doing their morning calisthenicsat the Payson Field Complex not far from the golf of Mexico, a solitary figure amongthe pulsation of jumping jacks, and motioned three Mets to step out of the exercise.The three, all good prospects, were John Christensen, a 24-year-old outfielder; DaveCochrane, a square but muscular switch-hitting third baseman; and Lenny Dykstra,a swift centerfielder who may be the Mets’ leading man of the future.
Ordering the three to collect their bats and batting helmets, Stottelmyer led theplayers to the north end of the complex where a large canvas enclosure had been constructedtwo weeks before. The rumor was that some irrigation machinery was being installedin an underground pit.
Standing outside the enclosure, Stottelmyer explained what he wanted. “First of all,”the coach said, “the club’s got kind of a delicate situation here, and it would helpif you keep reasonably quiet about it, O.K.?” The three nodded. Stottelmyer said,“We’ve got a young pitcher we’re looking at. We want to see what he’ll do with abatter standing in the box. We’ll do this alphabetically. John, go on in there, standat the plate and gave the pitcher a target. That’s all you have to do.”
“Do you want me to take a cut?” Christensen asked.”
Stottelmyre produced a dry chuckle. “You can do anything you want.”
Christensen pulled aside a canvas flap and found himself inside a rectangular areaabout 90 feet long and 30 feet wide, open to the sky, with a home plate set in theground just in front of him, and down at the far end a pitcher’s mound, with a smallgroup of Met front-office personnel standing behind it, facing home plate.
Christensen recognized Nelson Doubleday, the owner of the Mets, and Frank Cashen,wearing a long-billed fishing cap. He had never seen Doubleday at the training facilitybefore.
Christensen bats right-handed. As he stepped around the plate he nodded to Ronn Reynolds,the stocky reserve catcher who had been with the Mets organization since 1980. Reynoldswhispered up to him from his crouch, “Kid, you won’t believe what you’re about tosee.”
A second flap down by the pitcher’s end was drawn open, and a tall, gawky playerwalked in and stepped up onto the pitcher’s mound. He was wearing a small, blackfielder’s glove on his left hand and was holding a baseball in his right. Christensenhad never seen him before. He had blue eyes, Christensen remembers, and a pale, youthfulface, with facial muscles that were motionless, like a mask. “You notice it,” Christensenexplained later, “when a pitcher’s jaw isn’t working on a chaw or a piece of gum.”Then to Christensen’s astonishment he saw that the pitcher, pawing at the dirt ofthe mound to get it smoothed out properly and to his liking, was wearing a heavyhiking boot on his right foot.
Christensen had since been persuaded to describe that first confrontation:
“I’m standing in there to give this guy a target, just waving the bat once or twiceout over the plate. He starts his windup. He sways way back, like Juan Marichal,this hiking boot comes clomping over–I thought maybe he was wearing it for balanceor something–and he suddenly rears upright like a catapult. The ball is launchedfrom an arm completely straight up and stiff. Before you can blink, the ball is inthe catcher’s mitt. You hear it crack, and then there’s this little bleat from Reynolds.”
Christensen said the motion reminded him of the extraordinary contortions that heremembered of Goofy’s pitching in one of Walt Disney’s cartoon classics.
:I never dreamed a baseball could be thrown that fast. The wrist must have a lotto do with it, and all that leverage. You can hardly see the blur of it as it goesby. As for hitting the thing, frankly, I just don’t think it’s humanly possible.You could send a blind man up there, and maybe he’d do better hitting at the soundof the thing.”
Christensen’s opinion was echoed by both Cochrane and Dykstra, who followed him intothe enclosure. When each had done his stint, he emerged started and awestruck.
Especially Dykstra. Offering a comparison for Sports Illustrated, he reported thatout of curiosity he had once turned up the dials that control the motors of the pitchingmachine to maximum velocity, thus producing a pitch that went approximately 106 milesper hour. “What I looked at in there,” he said motioning toward the enclosure, “waswhistling by another third as fast, I swear.”
The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottelmyer,and a few members of the Mets’ front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentricmystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history,On St. Patrick’s Day, to make sure they were not all victims of crazy hallucinations,the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch’s fastball. The modelused was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighsabout five pounds, and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher.A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch’s velocity–accurate, so themanufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of thegauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is namedafter the old-timer’s descriptive–the “jug-handled” curveball was a Roscoe Tannerserve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned fora baseball was 103 mph, which it did curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at thatspeed. On March 17th, the gun was handled by Stottelmyer. He heard the pop of theball in Reynolds mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. The astonishingfigure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottelmyer remembers whistling in amazement,and then he heard Reynolds say, “Don’t tell me, Mel. I don’t want to know....”
The Met front office is reluctant to talk about Finch. The fact is, they know verylittle about him. He has had no baseball career. Most of his life has been spentabroad, except for a short period at Harvard University.
The registrar’s office at Harvard will release no information about Finch exceptthat in the Spring of 1976 he withdrew from the college in midterm. The alumni recordsin Harvard’s Holyoke Center indicate slightly more. Finch spent his early childhoodin an orphanage in Leicester, England and was adopted by a foster parent, the eminentarchaeologist Francis Whyte-Finch, who was killed in an airplane crash while on anexpedition in the Dhaulagiri mountain area of Nepal. At the time of the tragedy,Finch was in his last year at the Stowe School in Buckingham, England, from whichhe had been excepted into Harvard. Apparently, though, the boy decide to spend ayear in the general of the plane crash in the Himalayas (the plane was never actuallyfound) before he returned to the West and entered Harvard in 1975, dropping for unknownreasons the “Whyte” from his name. Hayden Finch’s picture is not in the freshmanyearbook. Nor, of course, did he play baseball at Harvard, having departed beforethe start of the spring season.
His assigned roommate was Henry W. Peterson, class of 1979, now a stockbroker inNew York with Dean Witter, who saw very little of Finch. “He was almost never there,”Peterson told Sports Illustrated. “I’d wake up morning after morning and look acrossat his bed, which had a native woven carpet of some sort on it–I have an idea hetold me it was made of yak fur–and never had the sense it had been slept in. Maybehe slept on the floor. Actually, my assumption was that he had a girl in Somervilleor something, and stayed out there. He had almost no belongings. A knapsack. A bowlhe kept on the corner on the floor. A couple of wool shirts, always very clean, andmaybe a pair or so of blue jeans. One pair of hiking boots. I always had the feelinghe was very bright. He had a French horn in an old case. I don’t know much aboutFrench-horn music, but he played beautifully. Sometimes he’d play it in the bath.He knew any number of languages. He was so adapt at them that he’d be talking inEnglish, which he spoke in this distinctive singsong way, quite Oriental, and he’duse a phrase like “pied-à-terre” and without it he’d sail along in Frenchfor a while until he’d drop in a German word like “angst” and he’d shift to thatlanguage. For any kind of sustained conversation you had to hope he wasn’t goingto use a foreign buzz word–especially out of the Eastern languages he knew, likeSanskrit–because that was the end of it as far as I was concerned.”
When Peterson was asked why he felt Finch had left Harvard, he shrugged his shoulder.“I came back one afternoon and everything was gone–the little rug, the horn, thestaff....Did I tell you that he had this long kind of shepherd’s crook standing inthe corner? Actually, there was so little stuff to begin with that it was hard totell he wasn’t there anymore. He left a curious note on the floor. It turned outto be a Zen koan, which is one of those puzzles which cannot be solved by the intellect.It’s the famous one about the live goose in the bottle. How do you get the gooseout of the bottle without hurting it or breaking the glass? The answer is, ‘There,it’s out!’ I heard from him once, from Egypt. He sent pictures. He was on his wayto Tibet to study.”
Finch’s entry into the world of baseball occurred last July in Old Orchard Beach,Maine, where the Mets’ AAA farm club, the Tidewater Tides, was in town playing theGuides. After the first game of the series, Bob Schaefer, the Tides’ manager, wasstrolling back to the hotel. He has very distinct memories of his first meeting withFinch: “I was walking by a park when suddenly this guy–nice-looking kid, clean-shaven,blue jeans, big boots–appears alongside. At first, I think maybe he wants an autographor to chat about the game, but no, he scrabbles around in a kind of knapsack, getsout a scuffed-up baseball and a small, black leather fielder’s mitt that looks likeit came out of the back of some Little League kid’s closet. This guy says to me,‘I have learned the art of the pitch....’ Some odd phrase like that, delivered ina singsong voice, like a chant, kind of what you hear in a Chinese restaurant ifthere are some Chinese in there.
“I am about to hurry on to the hotel when this kid points out a soda bottle on topof a fence post about the same distance home plate is from the pitcher’s rubber.He rears way back, comes around and pops the ball at it. Out there on that fencepost the soda bottle explodes. It disintegrates like a rifle bullet hit it–just littlespecks of vaporized glass in a puff. Beyond the post I could see the ball bouncingacross the grass of the park until it stopped about as far away as I can hit a three-woodon a good day.
“I said, very calm, ‘Son, would you mind showing me that again?’
“And he did. He disappeared across the park to find the ball–it had gone so far,he was after it for what seemed like 15 minutes. In the meantime I found a tin canfrom a trash container and set it up for him. He did it again–just kicked that canoff the fence like it was hit with a baseball bat. It wasn’t the accuracy of thepitch so much that got to me but the speed. It was like the tin can got belted assoon as the ball left the guy’s fingertips. Instantaneous. I thought to myself, ‘Mygod, that kid’s thrown the ball about 150 mph. Nolan Ryan’s fastball is a change-upcompared to what this kid just threw.’
“Well, what happens next is that we sit and talk, this kid and I, out there on thegrass of the park. He sits with the big boots tucked under his legs, like one ofthose yoga guys, and he tells me he’s not sure he wants to play big league baseball,but he’d like to give it a try. He’s never played before, but he knows the rules,even the infield-fly rule, he tells me with a smile, and he knows he can throw aball with complete accuracy and enormous velocity. He won’t tell me how he’s donethis except that he ‘learned it in the mountains, in a place called Po, in Tibet.’That is where he said he had learned to pitch...up in the mountains, flinging rocksand meditating. He told me his name was Hayden Finch, but he wanted to be calledSidd Finch. I said that most of the Sids we had in baseball came from Brooklyn. Orthe Bronx. He said his Sidd came from ‘Siddhartha,’ which means ‘Aim Attained’ or‘The Perfect Pitch.’ That’s what he had learned, how to throw the perfect pitch.O.K. by me, I told him, and that’s what I put on the scouting report, ‘Sidd Finch.’And I mailed it in to the front office.”
The reaction in New York once the report arrived was one of complete disbelief. Theassumption was that Schaefer was either playing a joke on his superiors or was sendingin the figment of a very powerful wish-fulfillment dream. But Schaefer is one ofthe most respected men in the Met organization. Over the past seven years, the clubshe has managed have one six championships. Dave Johnson, the Met manager, phonedhim. Schaefer verified what he had seen in Old Orchard Beach. He told Johnson thatsometimes, he too, though he’d had a dream, but he hoped the Mets would send Finchan invitation so that, at the very least, his own mind would be put at rest.
When a rookie is invited to training camp, he gets a packet of instructions in lateJanuary. The Mets sent off the usual literature to the address Schaefer had suppliedthem. To their surprise, Finch wrote back with a number of stipulations. He insistedthat he would report to St. Petersburg only with the understanding that: 1) therewere no contractual commitments; 2) during off-hours he be allowed to keep completelyto himself; 3) he did not wish to be involved in any of the team drills or activities;4) he would show the Mets his pitching prowess in privacy; 5) the whole operationin St. Petersburg was to be kept as secret as possible, with no press or photographs.
The reason for these requirements–he stated in a letter written (according to a sourcein the Met front office) in slightly stilted, formal and very polite terminology–wasthat he had not decided whether he actually wanted to play baseball. He wrote apologeticallythat there were mental adjustments to be made. He did not want to raise the Mets’expectations, much less those of the fans, and then dash them. Therefore it was bestif everything was carried on in secret or, as he put it in his letter, “in camera.”
At first, the inclination of the Met front office was to disregard this nonsenseout of hand and tell Finch either to apply, himself, through normal procedures orforget it. But the extraordinary statistics in the scouting report and Schaefer’sverification of them were too intriguing to ignore. On Feb. 2, Finch’s terms wereagreed to by letter. Mick McFadyen, the Mets’ groundskeeper in St. Petersburg, wasordered to build the canvas enclosure in a far corner of the Payson complex, completewith a pitcher’s mound and plate. Reynold’s order was about to start.
Reynolds is a sturdy, hardworking catcher (he has been described as looking likea high school football tackle). He has tried to be closed-lipped about Finch buthis experiences inside the canvas enclosure have made it difficult for him to resistanswering a few questions. He first heard about Finch from the Mets’ general manager.“Mr. Cashen called me into his office one day in early March,” Reynolds disclosed.“I was nervous because I thought I’d be traded. He was wearing a blue bow tie. Heleaned across the desk and whispered to me that it was very likely that I was goingto part of baseball history. Big doings! The Mets had this rookie coming to campand I was going to be his special catcher. All very hush-hush.
“Well, I hope nothing like that guy ever comes down the pike again. The first timeI see him is inside the canvas coop, out there on the pitcher’s mound, a thin kindgetting ready to throw, and I’m thinking he’ll want to toss a couple of warm-up pitches.So I’m standing behind the plate without a mask, chest protector, pads or anything,holding my glove up, sort of half-assed, to give him a target to throw at...and suddenlyI see this windup like a pretzel going loony, and the next thing, I’ve been blowntwo or three feet back, and I’m sitting on the ground with the ball in my glove.My catching hand feels like it’s been hit with a sledgehammer.”
He was asked: “Does he throw a curveball? A slider? Or a sinker?”
Reynolds grinned and shook his head. “Good questions! Don’t ask me.”
“Does it make a sound?”
“Yeah, a little pft, pft-boom!”
Stottelmyer has been in direct charge of Finch’s pitching regiment. His own playingcareer ended in the spring of 1975 with a rotator-cuff injury, which makes him especiallysensitive to the strain that a pitching motion can put on the arm. Although as closed-lippedas the rest of the staff, Stottelmyer does admit that Finch has developed a completelyevolutionary pitching style. He told Sports Illustrated: “I don’t understand themechanics of it. Anyone who tries to throw the ball that way should fall flat onhis back. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it a hundred times. It’s the most awesome thingthat has ever happened in baseball.”
Asked what influences might have contributed to Finch’s style and speed, Stottelmyersaid, “Well, cricket may have something to do with it. Finch has taken the powerand speed of the running throw of the cricket bowler and has somehow harnessed allthat energy to the pitching rubber. The wrist snap off that stiff arm is incredible.I haven’t talked to him but once or twice. I asked him if he ever thought of snappingthe arm, like baseball pitchers, rather than the wrist; It would increase the velocity.
“He replied, very polite, you know, with a little bob of the head: ‘I undertake asa rule of training to refrain from injury of living things.’
“He’s right of course. It’s Ronn Reynolds I feel sorry for. Every time that ballcomes in, first you hear this smack sound of the ball driving into the pocket ofthe mitt, and then you hear this little gasp, this ai yee!–the catcher, poor guy,his whole body shaking like an angina’s hit it. It’s the most piteous thing I’veever heard, short of a trapped rabbit.”
Hayden (Sidd) Finch arrived in St. Petersburg on Feb. 7. Most of the rookies andminor-leaguers stay at the Bridgewater Beach Inn. Assuming that Finch would checkin with the rest of the early arrivals, the Mets were surprised when he telephonedand announced that he had leased a room in a small boarding house just off FloridaAvenue near a body of water on the bay side called Big Bayou. Because his privatepitching compound had been constructed across the city and Finch does not drive,the Mets assigned him a driver, a young Tampa Bay resident, Eliot Posner, who pickshim up in the morning and returns him to Florida Avenue or, more often, to a beachon the gulf where, Posner reports, Finch, still in his baseball outfit and carryinghis decrepit glove, walks down to the water’s edge and, motionless, stares out atthe windsurfers. Inevitably, he dismisses Posner and gets back to his boarding houseon his own.
The Met management has found out very little about his life in St. Petersburg. Mrs.Roy Butterfield, his landlady reports (as one might expect) that “he lives very simply.Sometimes he comes in the front door, sometimes the back. Sometimes I’m not evensure he spends the night. I think he sleeps on the floor–his bed is always as neatas a pin. He has his own rug, a small little thing. I never have had a boarder whohad his own rug. He has a soup bowl. Not much, is what I say. Of course, he playsthe French horn. He plays it very beautifully and, thank goodness, softly. The notesfill the house. Sometimes I think the notes are coming out of my television set.”
Probably the member of the Met staff who has gotten the closest to Finch is Posner.When Posner returns to the Payson Complex, inevitably someone rushes out from theMets’ offices asking, “Did he say anything? What did he say?”
Posner takes out a notebook.
“Today he said, ‘When your mind is empty like a canyon you will know the power ofthe Way,’”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
While somewhat taxed by Finch’s obvious eccentricities, and with the exception ofthe obvious burden on the catchers, the Mets, it seems, have an extraordinary propertyin their camp. But the problem is no one is sure if Finch really wants to play. Hehas yet to make up his mind; his only appearances are in the canvas enclosure. Reynoldsmoans in despair when he is told Finch has arrived. Sometimes his ordeal is short-lived.After Finch nods politely at Reynolds and calls down “Namas-te!” (which means “greetings”in Sanskrit), he throws only four or five of the terrifying pitches before, witha gentle smile, he announces “Namas-te!” (it also means “farewell”) and gets intothe car to be driven away.
One curious manifestation of Finch’s reluctance to commit himself entirely to baseballhas been his refusal to wear a complete baseball uniform. Because he changes in hisrooming house, no one is quite sure what he will be wearing when he steps throughthe canvas flap into the enclosure. One afternoon he turned up sporting a tie hangingdown over the logo on his jersey, and occasionally–as Christensen noticed–he wearsa hiking boot on his right foot. Always, he wears his baseball cap back to front–theconjecture among the Met officials is that this sartorial behavior is an indicationof his ambivalence about baseball.
In hopes of understanding more about him, in early March the Mets called in a specialistin Eastern religion, Dr. Timothy Burns, the author of, among other treatises, Satori,or Four Years in a Tibetan Lamasery. Not allowed to speak personally with Finch forfear of “Spooking him,” Burns was able only to speculate about the Mets’ newest player.
According to sources from within the Met organization, Burns told a meeting of thecub’s top brass that the strange ballplayer in their midst was very likely a trapas,or aspirant monk.
A groan is said to have gone up from Nelson Doubleday. Burns said that Finch wasalmost surely a disciple of Tibet’s great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa, who was bornin the 11th century and died in the shadow of Mount Everest. Burns told them thatMilaraspa was a great yogi who could manifest an astonishing phenomenon: He couldproduce “internal heat,” which allowed him to survive snowstorms in the intense cold,wearing only a thin robe of white cotton. Finch does something similar–an apparentdeflection of the huge forces of the universe into throwing a baseball with bewilderingaccuracy and speed through the process and siddhi, namely the yogic mastery of mind-body.He mentioned that The Book of Changes, the 1 Ching, suggests that all acts (eventhrowing a baseball) are connected with the highest spiritual yearnings. Utilizingthe Tantric principle of body and mind, Finch has decide to pitch baseballs–at leastfor a while.
The Mets pressed Burns. Was there any chance that Finch would come to his sense andcommit himself to baseball?
“There’s a chance,” Burns told them. “You will remember that the Buddha himself,after what is called the Great Renunciation, finally realized that even in the mostsevere austerities–though he conquered lust and fear and acquired a great deal ofself-knowledge–truth itself could not necessarily be found. So after fasting forsix years he decided to eat again.”
Reached by Sports Illustrated at the University of Maryland, where he was lecturinglast week, Burns was less sanguine. “The biggest problem Finch has with baseball,”he said over the phone, “is that nirvana, which is the state all Buddhists wish toreach, means literally ‘the blowing out’–specifically the purifying of oneself ofgreed, hatred, and delusion. Baseball,” Burns went on, “is symbolized to a remarkabledegree by those very three aspects: greed (huge money contracts, stealing secondbase, robbing a guy of a base hit, charging for a seat behind an iron pillar, etc.),hatred (players dispising management, pitchers hating hitters, the Cubs detestingthe Mets, etc.) and delusion (the slider, the pitchout, the hidden-ball trick andso forth). So you can see why it is not easy for Finch to give himself up to a wayof life so opposite to what he has been led to cherish.”
Burns is more puzzled by Finch’s absorption with the French horn. He suspects thatin Tibet Finch may have learned to play the rkang-gling, a Tibetan horn made of humanthighbones, or perhaps even the Tibetan long trumpet, the dung-chen, whose sonorousbellowing in those vast Himalayan defiles is somewhat echoed in the lower registersof the French horn.
The Met inner circle believes that Finch’s problem may be that he cannot decide betweenbaseball and a career as a horn player. In early March the club contacted Bob Johnson,who plays the horn and is the artistic director of the distinguished New York Philomusicaensemble, and asked him to come to St. Petersburg. Johnson was asked to make a clandestineassessment of Finch’s ability as a horn player and, even more important, to makecontact with him. The idea was that, while praising him for the quality of his hornplaying, Johnson should try to persuade him that the lot of a French horn player(even a very fine one) was not a very gainful one. Perhaps that would tip the scalesin favor of baseball.
Johnson came down to St. Petersburg and hung around Florida Avenue for a week. Hereported later to Sports Illustrated: “I was being paid for it, so it wasn’t bad.I spent a lot of time looking up, so I’d get a nice suntan. Every once in a whileI saw Finch coming in and out of the rooming house, dressed to play baseball andcarrying the funny-looking black glove. Then one night I heard the French horn. Hewas playing it in his room. I have heard many great horn players in my career–BrunoJaenicke, who played for Toscanini; Dennis Brain, the great British virtuoso; AntonHorner of the Philadelphia Orchestra–and I would say Finch was on a par with them.He was playing Benjamine Breitten’s Serenade, for tenor horn and strings–a haunting,tender piece that provides great space for the player–when suddenly he produces abig, evocative bwong sound that seemed to shiver the leaves of the trees. Then heshifted to the rondo theme from the trio for violin, piano and horn by Brahms–justsensational. It may have had something to do with the Florida evening and a mildwind coming in over Big Bayou and tree frogs, but it was remarkable. I told thisto the Mets, and they immediately sent me home–presuming, I guess, that I was goingto hire the guy. That’s not far fetched. He can play for the Philomusica anytime.”
Meanwhile, the Mets are trying other ways to get Finch into a more positive frameof mind about baseball. Inquiries among American lamaseries (there are more than100 Buddhist societies in the U.S.) have been quietly initiated in the hope of findingmonks or priests who are serious baseball fans and who might persuade Finch thatthe two religions (Buddhism and baseball) are compatible. One plan is to get himinto a movie theater to watch The Natural, the mystical film about baseball, starringRobert Redford. Another film suggested is the baseball classic It Happens Every Spring,starring Ray Milland as a chemist who, by chance, discovers a compound that avoidswood; when applied to a baseball in the film, it makes Milland as effective a pitcheras Finch is in real life.
Conversations with Finch himself have apparently been exercises if futility. Allconventional inducements–huge contracts, advertising tie-ins, the banquet circuit,ticker-tape parades, having his picture on a Topps bubble-gum card, chatting on Kiner’sKorner (The Mets’ postgame TV show) and so forth–mean little to him. As do the perks(“You are very kind to offer me a Suzuki motorcycle, but I cannot drive”). He hasvery politely declined whatever opportunities the Mets have offered. The struggleis an absolutely internal one. He will resolve it. Last week he announced that hewould let the management know what he was going to do on or around April 1.
Met manager Davey Johnson has seen Finch throw about half a dozen pitches. He wasimpressed (“If he didn’t have this great control, he’d be like the Terminator outthere. Hell, that fastball, if off-target on the inside, would carry a batters kneecapback into the catcher’s mitt”), but he is leaving the situation to the front office.“I can handle the pitching rotation; let them handle the monk.” He has had one lastmeeting with Finch. “I was going to ask him if we could at least give him a decentfielder’s mitt. I asked him why he was so attached to the piece of rag he was using.‘It is,’ the guy told me, ‘the only one I have.’ Actually, I don’t see why he needsa better one. All he will ever need it for is to catch the ball for next pitch. Sothen I said to him, ‘There’s only one thing I can offer you, Finch, and that’s afair shake.”
According to Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ public relations man, Finch smiled at the offerof the fair shake and nodded his head politely–perhaps because it was the only nonmaterialoffer made. It did not encroach on Finch’s ideas about the renunciation of worldlygoods. It was an ingenious, if perhaps unintentional, move on the manager’s part.
Nelson Doubleday is especially hopeful about Finch’s ultimate decision. “I thinkwe’ll bring him around,” he said a few days ago. “After all, the guy’s not a nut,he’s a Harvard man.”
In the meantime, the Mets can only wait. Finch periodically turns up at the enclosure.Reynolds is summoned. There are no drills. Sometimes Finch throws for five minutes,instantly at top speed, often for half an hour. Then he leaves. Security around theenclosure has been tight. Since Finch has not signed with the Mets, he is technicallya free agent and a potential find for another club. The curious, even Met players,are politely shooed away from the Payson Field enclosure. So far Finch’s only associationwith Met players (other than Reynolds) has been a brief confrontation with Christensen,Cochrane and Dykstra when the front office nervously decided to test his controlwith a batter standing in the box. If he decides to play baseball, he will leavehis private world of the canvas enclosure and join Johnson and the rest of the squad.For the first time Gary Carter, the Mets’ regular catcher, will face the smoke ofthe Finch pitch, and the other pitchers will stand around and gawk. The press willhave a field day (“How do you spell Siddhartha? How do you grip the ball? How doyou keep your balance on the mound?”). The Mets will try to protect him from theglare and help him through the most dramatic of culture shocks, praying that in theprocess he will not revert and one day disappear.
Actually, the presence of Hayden (Sidd)Finch in the Mets’ training camp raises a number of interesting questions. Supposethe Mets (and Finch himself) can assuage and resolve his mental reservations aboutplaying baseball; supposed he is signed to a contract (one wonders what an asceticwhose major possessions are a bowl, small rug, a long stick and a French horn mightdemand); and suppose he comes to New York’s Shea stadium to open up the season againstthe St. Louis Cardinals on April 9. It does not matter that he has never taken afielding drill with his teammates. Presumably he will mow down the opposition ina perfect game. Perhaps Willie McGee will get a foul tip. Suppose Johnson discoversthat the extraordinary symbiotic relationship of mind and matter is indefatigable–thatFinch can pitch day after day at this blinding, unhittable speed. What will happento Dwight Gooden? Will Gary Carter and the backup catchers last the season? Whatwill it do to major league baseball as it is known today?
Peter Ueberroth, baseball’s new commissioner, was contacted by Sports Illustratedin his New York office. He was asked if he had heard anything about the Mets’ newphenomenon.
No, he had not. He had heard some rumors about the Mets’ camp this spring, but nothingspecific.
Did the name Hayden (Sidd) Finch mean anything to him?
Nope.
The commissioner was told that the Mets had a kid who could throw the ball over 150mph. Unhittable.
Ueberroth took a minute before he asked, “Roll that by me again?”
He was told in as much detail as could be provided about what was going on withinthe canvas enclosure of the Payson compound. It was possible that an absolute superpitcherwas coming into baseball–so remarkable that the delicate balance between pitcherand batter could be turned into disarray. What was baseball going to do about it?
“Well, before any decisions. I’ll tell you something,” the commissioner finally said,echoing what may very well be a nationwide sentiment this coming season. “I’ll haveto see it to believe it!”
THE END OF THE AFFAIR - SIDD FINCH
by George Plimpton
Sports Illustrated
April 8, 1985
The curious case of Sidd Finch, asrevealed by George Plimpton in last week’s issue, came to resolution Monday in St.Petersburg. The eccentric flame-thrower, whose pitches reportedly had been clockedat 168 mph, kept t his promise to tell the baseball world on April 1 whether he’djoin the New York Mets or concentrate on the French horn.
The Mets called a 12:30 p.m. press conference at Al Lang Stadium and formally unveiledFinch to the media. Reading from a statement written in a stilted, anachronisticstyle (he referred to the Mets as the Metropolitans and to Mel Stottelmyer and DaveyJohnson as Melvin and David, respectively), Finch explained that the pinpoint accuracyrequired to harness his astonishing fastball had deserted him. “The Perfect Pitch,”said the Mystic Met, “once a thing of harmony, is now an instrument of Chaos andCruelty.”
Finch thanked the team for allowing him to try out, in particular “Melvin” for showinghim the slide (a phenomenon, he said, unknown in the Himalayas), and apologized tocatcher Ronn Reynolds for brutalizing his glove hand.
He then gave a gallant wave and walked away, very much alone.