The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  I don't know how Debbie Sue got Sidd to agree, but the two of them turned up on schedule. I waited for them at the entrance to the Magic Kingdom. I saw them coming down the midway, Debbie Sue in her Mickey Mouse shirt, Sidd in a striped jersey, Levi's, and heavy boots. Debbie Sue immediately bought him a Goofy hat with two teeth hanging off the brim, and two black ears that hung down alongside his head.

  We stood in line for the rides, Debbie Sue impatient, craning, standing on tiptoe, to see why things weren't moving. She insisted on going through the Haunted House three times; we waited over an hour to take a second trip through Space Mountain. In the lines Sidd and I had a chance to talk about Dalkowski.

  "My friend said he scared whole towns when he pitched," I told him. "Control. That was the ingredient that was missing."

  Sidd asked if Dalkowski knew what the secret of his speed was. I replied that occasionally he talked about a Higher Power. What he'd repeat over and over to Pat Jordan was "I had it and then I lost it."

  I told Sidd that he had never made it. He worked now in the fields out West as a crop-picker.

  Sidd looked so melancholy in his Goofy hat that I had to smile at him.

  "If he had control," I said, "he would have turned the league upside down."

  "Was he a freak?"

  "Maybe."

  We left Disney World after dinner. We turned the rented car in and drove back together in the Volkswagen. Debbie Sue was still exhilarated by the Disney World rides. An hour out of Orlando she saw the spoked lights of the Ferris wheel at a county fair against the night sky. She shouted with pleasure. "Please! Please!" We gave in to her enthusiasm. We paid a dollar to park in a grass field.

  The carnival was attached to a small circus. The performance under the tent had just ended. Outside, an elephant reached up with his trunk and helped the trainer remove a tasseled ceremonial blanket from his back. We watched jugglers perform in a sideshow booth. Insects fizzed against the lights; there was a constant throb of electric generators. Calliope music accompanied the slow revolutions of the Ferris wheel. Debbie Sue and Sidd rode together. I stood below and watched their chair sway at the apex of the ride. Debbie Sue's face appeared over the side, small and pale from that height, and she shouted down where was I?-that Owls belonged up there with them in the sky!

  We wandered down the red-dirt midway. We stopped by a booth where for a dollar the customer could buy three baseballs and try to knock over a pyramid of heavy wooden bottles. We watched a few people try it unsuccessfully. A couple of bottles always seemed to be standing after a customer was done. The prizes-stuffed animals with small button eyes-squatted in rows, squashed together, up on the shelves.

  "Come on, Sidd, try it."

  He shook his head.

  She nagged him but he refused. Finally she said she'd show him how. She put a dollar on the counter. With a little hop, she threw the first ball into the booth. The bottle at the top of the pyramid fell off.

  "Do I get something?"

  "They all gotta go, lady," the counterman said. He gazed out at the midway, his jaw working slightly on gum. He took almost no interest in the fate of his bottles behind him. Debbie Sue knocked two more over with her last throws. Hardly looking, he set the bottles back upright in their pyramid before plumping himself back down on a little stool behind the counter to resume his contemplation of the midway goings-on.

  Perhaps his laconic attitude finally induced Sidd to try. He pulled out his wallet and extracted a dollar. I realized it was the first time I was going to see him throw. First he took off his boot and set it carefully by the foot of the counter. He backed off four or five steps to give the motion of his delivery plenty of room. He looked at the pyramid of bottles briefly, working his fingers around the seam of the baseball, and then, swaying back, he shot his leg, barefooted, up into the air, stiff as a spear, and whipped the ball into the booth.

  It was as if he had tossed in a grenade. The ball, whacking into the center of the triangle of bottles with sledgehammer force, produced a kind of chain reaction. The pyramid disintegrated; various splinters and bottle parts spun about like shrapnel. A bottle twirled up among the stuffed animals, clearing two or three off the shelves and setting the button eyes of three or four others bobbing. The counterman yelled, "Hey!" He half crouched as he looked back.

  The baseball continued on through a baseboard into the booth behind. We heard the tinkle of falling pieceschina figurines, apparently, and mugs. Voices from back there called out, "Hey! Hey!"

  Sidd looked a little startled at what he had done-his face drawn with apology under his Goofy hat. He spread his hands apart. He sat down in the midway, his back to the counter, dusting the dirt from his toes, and started pulling his boot back on.

  "I'll have that one," Debbie Sue was saying, pointing to a large wool bear with a red ribbon around its neck.

  The news of what Sidd had done swept down the midway. The countermen stood up and stared at us as we walked by. Debbie Sue stopped and played a few games. The countermen seemed very deferential, advising, helping, sliding the rings over the poles, or whatever-anything to keep the tall gawky gentleman standing behind her wearing the Goofy hat from stepping in. He carried the stuffed animals she won.

  We put the animals in the front seat of the Volkswagen. Debbie Sue cuddled in the back with Sidd. "He was like a gunfighter, wasn't he, Owl-stalking down the midway and all those people jittery behind their counters?"

  From the back seat Sidd cleared his throat. "Dalkowski could have done that," he suddenly said to me.

  "If his control was on," I replied. "Oh, absolutely."

  The next day I arrived back from Amory Blake in midafternoon. I did not expect to find either of them in; the sun was bright and a warm salt-scented wind was blowing in off the Gulf. To my surprise, Debbie Sue met me at the door. She looked worried. "The Mets have been calling all morning. The story's out."

  "What story?" For a moment I thought she was referring to the destroyed booths at the carnival.

  "Someone found out about Sidd and the Mets. It's in Sports Illustrated."

  "Where's Sidd?"

  She told me he was out meditating by the frog pond. She had a copy of the magazine in her hand. We went out to the back porch and I took a look at it. The article was called "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch"-a fourteenpage spread accompanied by photographs of various Mets personnel-Nelson Doubleday, Frank Cashen, Mel Stottlemyre, and others, even one of Finch himself pitching on the beach, three soda-pop cans set up in the far distance as targets. Finch was in the foreground, with his hiking boot anchoring that strange delivery, a long bare foot aloft, his baseball cap on backward-unmistakably Finch, though the photograph was snapped from such a great distance that he seemed to float between the gray sky and the beach in a kind of ethereal mist.

  The article was written by George Plimpton, the darkside-of-the-moon-of-Walter-Mitty fellow who, as a participatory journalist, had played briefly with the Detroit Lions, the Boston Celtics, the Boston Bruins, and so forth, in order to write about his experiences. I occasionally ran into him in my Sports Illustrated days-a solemn, tall figure who always seemed to hang around the premises of the editorial floor of the Time-Life Building long after everyone else had left. He walked wearily down the long corridors, as if taking a constitutional in a prison. He was trying to meet his deadlines. He did not have an office. They shunted him around to cubicles that were temporarily unoccupied because the reporters-or "writers" as they called us-were off on assignment. When I went by the open door of his cubicle he would look up instantly, as if desperate for interruption. He told me what it was like to work late in that midtown skyscraper-the place empty and quiet except for the distant moan of a floor polisher; occasionally a cleaning lady would peer in and point at the big wastebaskets by his desk and ask, "Okay?" The memorable sound, he told me, was the creak of the skyscraper itself-the girders contracting-could it be?from the cool after the summer heat-pronounced enough at times to make him imagine he wa
s at sea. "It's like an aircraft carrier in here-abandoned," he said mournfully.

  For his article about Sidd Finch he must have had a lot of cooperation from various sources in St. Petersburg, and from the Mets themselves. Apparently the story had begun to unravel when Mel Stottlemyre, the pitching coach, felt he had to know how Finch would react with batters actually standing in at the plate. On the morning of March 14 he had gone over to the pre-practice calisthenics and walked in among the pulsation of push-ups and jumping jacks. He had pulled out three playersJohn Christensen, a young outfielder, Dave Cochrane, a switch-hitting third baseman, and Lenny Dykstra, a swift center fielder who at the time was thought to be the Mets lead-off man of the future and indeed has turned out to be so. Asking them to collect their bats and batting helmets, Stottlemyre led the players to the canvas enclosure.

  He was reported as having said, "We'll do this alpha betically. John, go on in there, stand at the plate, and give the pitcher a target. That's all you have to do."

  "Do you want me to take a cut?" Christensen asked.

  Stottlemyre apparently laughed at this. He said, "You can do anything you want."

  Christensen bats right-handed. As he stepped around the plate inside the enclosure he nodded to Ronn Reynolds. Reynolds whispered to him from his crouch, "Kid, you won't believe what you're about to see."

  A second flap down by the pitcher's end was drawn open, and a tall, gawky player walked in and stepped up onto the pitcher's mound. He was wearing a small black fielder's glove on his left hand and was holding a baseball in his right. Christensen had never seen him before. He had gray eyes, Christensen remembers, and a pale, youthful face, with facial muscles that were motionless, like a mask. "You notice it," Christensen explained later, "when a pitcher's jaw wasn't working on a chaw of tobacco or a piece of gum."

  Then, to Christensen's astonishment, he saw that the pitcher, pawing at the mound to get it smoothed out properly and to his liking, was doing so with a left foot that was bare; on the other was a heavy hiking boot.

  Christensen's description of that first confrontation read as follows:

  "I'm standing in there to give this guy a target, just waving the bat once or twice out over the plate. He starts his windup. He sways way back, like Juan Marichal. The hiking boot is anchored on the pitching rubber. The left foot, the bare one, goes up in the air, the dirt spilling out from between the toes. The ball comes in from an arm completely straight up, and before you can blink, the ball is in the catcher's mitt. You hear it crack in the mitt and there's this little bleat from Reynolds.

  "I never dreamed a baseball could be thrown that fast. The wrist must have a lot to do with it, and all that lever age. You can hardly see the blur of it as it goes by. As for hitting the thing, frankly, I just don't think it's possible. You could send a blind man up there, and maybe he'd do better hitting at the sound of the thing."

  Christensen's opinion was echoed by both Cochrane and Dykstra, who followed him into the enclosure. When each had done his stunt, he emerged startled and awestruck.

  The magazine had interviewed Ronn Reynolds. He described being called into Cashen's office one day in early March. "I was nervous because I thought I was being traded. He was wearing a blue bow tie. He leaned across the desk and whispered to me that it was very likely that I was going to be a part of baseball history. Big doings! The Mets had this rookie coming to camp and 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 time I see him is inside the canvas coop, out there on the pitcher's mound, 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. I'm holding my glove up, sort of half-assed, to give him a target to throw at ... and suddenly I see the windup, like a pretzel gone loony, and the next thing, I've been blown two 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."

  The article disclosed very little about Sidd Finch himself. The Mets front office, it reported, was "reluctant" to talk about him. The article did mention his early childhood in an orphanage, his adoption by a famous anthropologist, the supposed death of the latter in a plane crash in the Himalayas; there was a short mention of Stowe, and Finch's acceptance at Harvard.

  The editors had tracked down his assigned roommate at the time, Henry W. Peterson, Class of 1979, now a stockbroker in New York City with Dean Witter. What Peterson remembered about being his roommate was illuminating: "He was almost never there," he told Sports Illustrated. "I'd wake up morning after morning and look across at his bed, which had a woven native rug of some sort on it-I have an idea he told me it was made of yak fur-and I never had the sense it had been slept in. Maybe he slept on the floor. Actually, my assumption was that he had a girl in Somerville or something, and stayed out there. He had almost no belongings. A knapsack. A bowl he kept in the corner on the floor. A couple of wool shirts, always very clean, and maybe a pair or so of blue jeans. One pair of hiking boots. I always had the feeling that he was very bright. He had a French horn in an old case. I don't know much about French horn music but he played beautifully. Sometimes he'd play it in the bath.

  "He knew any number of languages. He was so adept at them that he'd be talking in English, which he spoke in this distinctive singsong way, quite oriental, and he'd use a phrase like `pied-a-terre' and without knowing it he'd sail along in French for a while until he'd drop in a German word like `angst' and then he'd shift gears into that language. For any kind of sustained conversation you had to hope he wasn't going to use a foreign buzz word-especially out of the Eastern languages he knew, like Sanskrit-because that was the end of it as far as I was concerned."

  When Sports Illustrated asked Peterson why he felt Finch had left Harvard, he shrugged his shoulders. "I came back one afternoon and everything was gone-the little rug, the horn, the staff. Actually, there was so little to begin with that it was hard to tell he wasn't there anymore. He left a curious note on the floor. It turned out to be a Zen koan, which is one of those puzzles that cannot be solved by the intellect. It was the famous one about the live goose in the bottle. `How do you get the goose out of the bottle without hurting it or breaking the glass?' The reply is, `There, it's out!' "

  I looked up from Sports Illustrated.

  "Has Sidd seen all this?" I asked Debbie Sue.

  She nodded.

  "The Mets must be having a fit. They'll assume Sidd thinks that someone on the staff leaked all this stuff."

  "He didn't seem very bothered," Debbie Sue said.

  She reported that he had gone down to the little pond to improve on his frog imitations, and afterward he was going to meditate on the far side of the palmetto grove.

  I went back to the article.

  There were some notable omissions ... nothing in it about dropping baseballs out of a blimp to get the catchers prepared for the Finch fastball; nor had they uncovered the astonishing fact that Finch had developed his skills by throwing rocks at snow leopards creeping down on yak pens.

  What was surprising was that no mention was made of Debbie Sue. She would have been a paparazzo's dream there on the dunes. The photographer (Lane Stewart) had taken some graphic pictures on the beach, quite heavily grained from the considerable distance he had clicked the shutter, but they were of Sidd alone, a foot, the bare one, with its hideously long, crooked toe discernible, arched high against the misty-looking dunes in the background. But no Debbie Sue. Obviously the photographs had been taken before the two had met.

  There was a photo portrait of Mrs. Butterfield, a rather imperious lady, sitting on her porch wearing a doublestranded necklace of small shells. She verified what Cashen had told me about her vague discomfiture with Sidd Finch's horn playing, but no mention was made of his incredible ability to imitate and throw sounds. Nor did Mrs. Butterfield say anything about Debbie Sue. Apparently she had be
en interviewed before she had come home from the movies to find the long-legged girl from the Windsurfer lalapaloozing around her boardinghouse.

  I noted some mild errors. It was reported that Finch had been offered a number of inducements-"huge contracts, advertising tie-ins, large speaking fees on the banquet circuit, having his picture on a Topps bubble-gum card, the chance to endorse sneakers and baseball mitts, chats on Kiner's Korner (the Mets postgame show with Ralph Kiner) and so forth." I knew for a fact that the Mets, while obviously aching to dangle such offers, had not actually spoken to Finch about any of them.

  The article reported that the Mets had made inquiries among lamaseries in the United States (it turned out there are more than a hundred Buddhist societies) in the hope of finding monks or priests who were serious baseball fans. The idea (I wondered if it was Nelson Doubleday's) was that such a monk might be persuaded to show up in Pass-a-Grille and waylay Finch ... stop him in the street ("Namas-te") and invite him to tea, over which he would push the charms of baseball and persuade Sidd that the two religions (baseball and Buddhism) were compatible.

  The Mets management had also taken notice of Finch's French horn playing. According to the article, the notion had occurred to someone that his dilemma was that he could not decide whether he wanted to play professional baseball or a French horn. In early March the club contacted Bob Johnson, who plays the horn and is the artistic director of the distinguished New York Philomusica ensemble. He was asked to come to St. Petersburg and make a clandestine appraisal of Finch's ability as a horn player, and, even more important, to make contact with him. The idea was that, while praising him for the quality of his horn playing, Johnson should try to persuade him that the lot of a French-horn player (even a very fine one) was not especially gainful. Perhaps that would tip the scales in favor of baseball.