The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  He had a practical answer. He said his procedure was to look out the locker-room window-just as he was doing now-to estimate how many fans were waiting for him. Multiplying this number by 6.5, which was the number of seconds he spent scribbling in each autograph book or on a scrap of paper, he then divided that figure by sixty to give him the number of minutes it would take him to work himself through the crowd to slide into the front seat of his car and slip away. That was how he answered the only question I asked him.

  Perhaps because we had been chatting about Sadaharu Oh, the next morning at breakfast I told Sidd about a dream, a very vivid one, I'd had the night before. I very rarely remember my dreams, which is fortunate since I suspect most of them are nightmares best left to quake far beneath the surface. The dream was about a baseball game in India. Sidd was on the mound. I had a brief glimpse of an elephant, waiting, complete with mahout, out in the bull pen, ready to bring in a relief pitcher.

  Sidd was evidently in trouble. A couple of men were on base, dancing down the base paths, joshing at him, and invoking Hindi epithets. Up to the plate came the batter -a small, balding Ghandi-like figure with bow legs. I was told he was from Burma. As he came I remember thinking that being bow-legged was such a distinctive feature of great athletes-Pele, Willie Mays, Pancho Segura. He was wearing a diaperlike dhoti and carrying a silver baseball bat with which, as he stepped into the batter's box, he whacked his uplifted bare foot on the heel, dislodging a shower of sand and small stones from between his toes.

  Finch wound up, his bare foot hanging in the air, poised there with the dirt streaming from it ... like the water from the uplifted bow of a yacht pitching in a heavy sea. The ball sped in that terrifying streak toward the plate, and the little Ghandi-like figure uncorked a swing. It all seemed instantaneous-the pitch and swing occurring at the same time, except that the action continued: the silver bat gave off a musical, terrifying bong, and the ball rose in a majestic trajectory out toward the elephant in the bull pen. I could see the mahout's face shine in the sun as he turned to watch the ball go overhead. The Ghandi-like figure trotted bow-legged around the bases accompanied by a man who hurried out from the dugout to shield him from the sun with a little silk parasol. When the pair reached the plate the slugger delivered a series of high-fives to the upstretched hands of his teammates clustered there to meet him. The parasol bobbed above them.

  Sidd wanted to know what happened then.

  I said that the dream, like all dreams, was somewhat fuzzy, but I had the impression that the Burmese slugger had hit two more mammoth home runs, and a Baltimorechop single-a term I had to explain to him. On the base paths after his single he was accompanied by the parasol carrier. He moved on to second on a sacrifice bunt, hurrying down with the parasol held beautifully in place above him by his companion, but he was stranded there.

  Sidd seemed fascinated by what I was telling him. Subsequently he would bring up the Burmese batter in conversation and ask me to tell him about him again. It was as if for him the dream figure had taken on corporeal qualities.

  He wanted me to tell him about the real-life titans of baseball-Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Mays-I did the best I could. He also began asking me about fastball pitchers -trying to pin me down on how fast they could throw. I remembered what Frank Cashen had told me. "Nolan Ryan. Goose Gossage. About a hundred and three miles per hour. Pretty small potatoes compared to you."

  He looked embarrassed. "There is nobody faster?"

  Something stirred in my mind. "I've heard of one who was supposed to be much faster than either Ryan or Gossage. Or Feller or Koufax, any of those fellows. Unbelievably fast. He had a Polish name."

  Sidd brought his palms together. "Please . . . "

  "A friend of mine, Pat Jordan, in my Sports Illustrated days, wrote about him. Pat's a former pitcher. He wrote a fine book about baseball called The False Spring. This Polish guy never made it to the big leagues because he was wild. But he was a legend...."

  Sidd said, "I would be most grateful if you could find out about the Polish pitcher...."

  His name came to me. Steve Dalkowski. I told Sidd what I remembered. He was in the Baltimore Orioles organization in the ig6os. He had a chunky physique, well under six feet (one expected terrific speed to come out of a tall, rangy frame), and I remember Jordan telling me that his teammates called him "Moon Man" for the thick round glasses he wore. It did not help a batter's confidence to step in at the plate and see the rims of those things glint in the afternoon sun.

  There were all sorts of stories about him. One was that Ted Williams in spring training had picked up a bat and stepped in to take a look at Dalkowski's stuff. After one fast ball, Williams put his bat down on the plate. He stated that the only time he'd ever get in a batter's box against this guy again would be in a game situation where he had to.

  Sidd seemed eager to find out more about Dalkowski (very much as he kept pressing me about the Burmese slugger with the silver bat) ... indeed to such a degree that, coupled with my own curiosity, I reached for the phone one afternoon and called up Sports Illustrated to ask after Jordan.

  They were astonished to hear from me. Was I coming back to write for them? No, I told them. I was looking for a fellow staff member, Pat Jordan. I was told he was freelancing for them. He was working out of Fort Lauderdale. They gave me his phone number.

  That week I had a chance to drop in on him. It coincided with a short tip to Miami. I had to postpone a visit to Amory Blake. He urged me to go. "A trip will be good for you." He suggested a leisurely swing back up the coast, perhaps a look at Disney World in Orlando on the way back.

  I flew to Miami, and rented a car. I finished my business and on the way north I stopped off and saw Pat Jordan in Fort Lauderdale. We sat on the little patio overlooking a canal. Both Pat and his wife, Susan, were body-building enthusiasts-in such superb shape and so oiled-brown from the sun that I felt pasty sitting with them. Susan had the muscles of a runner, quite unlike the smooth sheen of Debbie Sue's young legs. "Two truths," Pat said. "One is that every woman has to make peace with the realization she is not beautiful. The other is that every man has it come to him that he's not going to make it as a great athlete." He leaned forward out of his deck chair. "But you can always do something with your body. That's why Susan and I work out. We go to the gym every morning at seven o'clock." I said that was terrific. I was going to do the same at some point. I took a sip of the vodka and soda Susan had made for me.

  Opposite, across the canal, moored along the seawall, was the forward half of the fuselage of a DC-4 airliner. Its owner was fashioning it into a houseboat. Halfway down its length was an ovaloid patch where the wing had been. "Terrible eyesore, isn't it," Pat said. "The guy who owns it took it out, down the canal, a couple of big outboard motors propelling it, not long ago, and all the neighbors stood along the seawall and shouted at him."

  "Quite a neighborhood," I said.

  Jordan gestured. "The guy down the line is an insurance collector-a guy who makes his entire living initiating lawsuits. He hangs around supermarkets waiting to hear somebody drop a jar of mustard or something so he can run around, slide in the stuff, fall down, and sue. He's the kind of guy who jams on the brakes and hopes somebody smacks into him from behind. He makes quite a nice living at it."

  "You're surrounded by the stuff of novels," I said.

  We reminisced for a time about the the old days at Sports Illustrated. Susan went to jog for an hour. I told Pat a little about Sidd Finch, really no more than that he was up in St. Petersburg trying out with the Mets, that he had some theories about pitching, speed pitching in particular, and that he was curious about Steve Dalkowski.

  "Another crazy who wants to pitch in the big leagues," Pat said mockingly.

  "He's got great control," I said. "Learned it pegging stones at snow leopards in the Himalayas."

  "Ho. Ho. Ho."

  Pat was engaging and wry about his own pitching days. He was funny about catchers. "A pitcher'll walk t
hree guys. So the catcher lifts his mask up on top of his head and he walks halfway out to the mound, the tops of his knee pads clacking, and fires the ball back. He shouts out, `Throw strikes!' What the hell! So they know so much. Joe Torre did that to me once and I shouted back at him, `Waddya think I'm doing out here? Trying to throw balls?' "

  "Tell me about Dalkowski."

  Jordan said, "We practically grew up together. We pitched in Connecticut high schools just down the line from each other. Dalkowski really cost me my career. He made you think that the strikeout was the only thing. I'd get two and two on a guy, and rather than trying to get him to pop up a slow curve, I'd try to steam a fastball by to strike him out. Gotta match Dalkowski! I'd lose that batter. I lost too many, trying to copy a living legend who never even made it to Triple-A. Dalkowski ruined more pitchers than he did hitters. He did everything wrong. He short-armed the ball, like a girl. He was blind-wore thick glasses. He started drinking when he was fourteenhanging around those New Britain bars with pickled pigs feet on the counter and the bartenders don't know what a mixed drink is."

  "What did he pitch like?"

  "He had a small compact delivery. His arm flicked out from the side of his body. The Orioles, who had signed him, felt that the secret of his speed lay in a curiously thin and elongated wrist. Dalkowski himself had no idea. It was a gift.

  "All of this started in high school. He got faster and faster. He struck out seventeen and eighteen batters a game, and usually walked about the same number. Sometimes he was able to control his delivery. In one game, with a lot of scouts in the stands, he struck out twentyfour batters and walked only four.

  "He got signed into the Oriole organization in 1957. They shipped him to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he learned to chew tobacco. The reason he didn't go directly into the majors was, of course, his control. His coaches tried all sorts of things. They'd put a batter on either side of the plate-very nervous guys they must have been-to get Dalkowski to throw down the alley between them. Then they thought maybe his control would improve if he didn't throw so fast. So they made the poor guy warm up hard for half an hour before a game to wear him down."

  An ambulance went by, its siren wailing. Jordan said, "In this part of Florida, when you hear a siren it's either old people dropping or young people running into each other."

  I asked if Dalkowski worried about hitting a batter.

  "They used to say that Walter Johnson, `The Big Train,' was scared of killing someone with his fastball. He thought of himself as a potential murderer. It got to him. It got to Dalkowski too. Finally he threw a fastball that sailed in and took a kid's ear off ... sent him to the hospital with a concussion. The kid, who was in the Dodger organization, was never quite right after that. Had trouble remembering his name. That must have affected Dalkowski. There were any number of legends. Dalkowski threw a ball through the home-plate screen. In one game he threw a ball so fast that the batter had to go back into the clubhouse to change his pants. Dalkowski told me about it-'I threw so hard that night that I scared the whole town.'

  "People swung in self-defense just to get out of there. Fans'd come up after a game and ask to touch his arm ... so they could tell their grandchildren. I saw this. The guy came up and asked. Steve stood there blinking behind these round spectacles and he held his arm out like the man wanted. The guy looked at the arm as if it weren't really attached to anything-just dangling there like a piece of modem sculpture hanging from a wire. And he touched it, real light, with the tip of his finger.

  "He was a kid, really. At Stockton, when he was there, he got fooling around with a tractor in center field and drove the thing through the clubhouse and almost got the manager, Billy DeMars, who was sitting in his office out back. On the spot DeMars bawled him out and fined him $175. Couldn't have been much of a clubhouse! But the bawling-out must have been all right, because Dalkowski went out that night and struck out seventeen and walked only two. He was obviously in need of a father figure like DeMars to keep him on the tracks."

  "How fast do you reckon he was?" I asked.

  "No one knows for sure. The Orioles tried to measure him at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. But there were a number of mitigating circumstances. He threw not from a mound but on level ground. A mound was fifteen inches up, or was then, and you generate maybe ten miles per hour more speed from there. It took him forty minutes of throwing just to get the ball into the parameters of the radar measuring equipment-that'll give you some idea of his control problems-and by the time he got the ball where he wanted it, he must have been exhausted. So take off eight miles or more per hour. Then he'd also pitched the night before, which usually was followed by a binge in the bars, so he couldn't have been feeling so hot. Take off five for that. As it was, the mechanism clocked him at 93.5. The consensus was that if he'd been in top pitching form and thrown from a mound, his fastball would have clocked out well over a hundred and ten miles per hour. Maybe a lot more. It left Steve's hand the size of a white dot, the proverbial aspirin, then disappeared ... and then all of a sudden it appeared at the plate the size of a moon! It exploded! Batters went white! The odd thing was-so catchers told me who had caught him-that the fastball was as light as a feather. It was like catching one of those perforated plastic jobs-a whiffle ball. Cal Ripken caught him once in Pensacola. He was the one who told me a pitched ball from him was as light as a feather. He said that his pitch took off two feet. It went up. His control problems-thank God for the batters-were vertical rather than horizontal. If he didn't throw it at your shoe tops, you couldn't catch it. You had to keep your glove high. Once Ripken signaled for a curveball and he crouched down for it. Dalkowski never caught the sign and he threw a fastball, which sailed up and hit the umpire on the mask, broke it, and put him in the hospital for three days with a concussion. The ball hopped up to eye level."

  I asked Pat if Dalkowski had any idea how he was able to throw the ball with such velocity.

  He shook his head. "He wasn't much on theory, you know. He once told me, `Sometimes the plate looked real close, like I could hand the ball to the catcher. Then the next time the thing'd be a country mile away and I couldn't find it worth a damn.' "

  On a motorboat just down the way a girl turned on an electric polisher and began sanding the planking of the foredeck.

  "It's almost a shipyard you've got here."

  "Does your guy Finch have any idea about his pitching?" Jordan asked.

  "He's a Buddhist. The technique is called lung-gom."

  Pat grinned and said it took all kinds. "Dalkowski once told me that a higher power took it away from him just when he had it all together. In a preseason game against the Yankees in the mid-sixties he hurt himself. In the first inning he'd struck out Roger Maris on three pitches. His arm went fielding a bunt. He flipped the ball to first and heard something go in his arm. Even after that he was throwing well over ninety. He was truly a living legend, though he never even got into Triple-A ball. He played in every Class C league in America."

  "Where is he now?" I asked.

  "He works the fields out in California, picking whatever crop they need hands for ... out in Stockton, Fresno, Grapevine. He's just about the only white man out there in the groves. They say he's a hell of a picker ... espe cially with oranges. Those great baseball hands nip them off the branches like it was nothing. Down at each end of the row he keeps a bottle of cheap wine-white port-so that he's got something to work toward. Maybe that's what makes him faster than just about any of the other pickers. He's a legend in those fields."

  N THE WAY BACK from Miami I drove up the east coast to Vero Beach, where the Dodgers have their spring training camp. The Mets were scheduled to play an afternoon game there; I bought a ticket. I thought vaguely that the management might have talked to Sidd and persuaded him to come down from St. Petersburg with the team.

  The Dodger complex is much fancier than the Mets'. It has its own golf course; the streets, neatly groomed, are named after past Dodger heroes (Koufax Avenue
). The hometown uniforms are such a brilliant, laundered white that it is an ease on the eyes to wear sunglasses. Tom Lasorda, their manager and famous for his consumption of pasta, moves among his players like a spinnaker. A kind of carnival atmosphere imbued the game itself. When a foul ball arched back over the stands and landed in an artificial lake, the announcer played a recording of a splash on the public address system and then the alarmed quacking of ducks.

  I saw no sign of Finch. But Nelson Doubleday was sitting in a front box with Frank Cashen. After a while they spotted me up behind them in the stands and motioned me down to join them.

  Doubleday introduced me to his wife, Sandra, a willowy blonde who said she knew my sister. "This guy and I met in a blimp," her husband said. She smiled politely.

  "That's true," I said.

  "What's the word?" Doubleday asked, coming right to the point.

  "Sidd? Well, I think he likes the game," I said. "Sometimes at Huggins he watches the intrasquad games from out behind the bleachers."

  "Does he talk with you about baseball?" Doubleday wanted to know.

  "He's always asking ... well ... questions any foreigner would ask. He wanted to know what the rosin bag is for. He's struggling with the rules. He didn't understand you could tag up and take a base after a caught fly ball. We still have the infield fly rule to come."

  Doubleday stirred in his seat and said in exasperation, "To think we have the best pitcher in baseball and he doesn't know what the goddamn rosin bag is for!"

  After the game I drove north along the coast and spent the night in a motel in Melbourne. I thought about following Amory Blake's suggestion and stopping off for a day at Disney World on my way across the peninsula to the Tampa area.

  I called the bungalow. Debbie Sue answered. "Owl! Owl!" She said they missed me. They were climbing the walls. When was I coming back?

  When she stopped for a breath I suggested that she and Sidd take the Volkswagen and we'd meet at Disney World the next day. They could drive down after Sidd's stint in the canvas enclosure at Huggins. We'd have the afternoon and part of the evening.