The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  My sister was delighted at the news that I had moved to New York. "You're coming home," she said. "Puget Sound. The Seychelles. Lamu. Pass-a-Grille. The Big Apple." She offered me the use of her station wagon, which she kept in New York-her one extravagance, she said of the expense, since she liked the idea of being able to escape into New England at a moment's notice.

  "That's on the condition you introduce me to the Buddhist and the girl who windsurfs."

  Sidd and Debbie Sue turned up three days after I had signed the lease and moved in. It was odd seeing them in the environment of a New York apartment rather than the subterranean shadows of the Pass-a-Grille bungalow. Both arrived at the door carrying their belongings in bundles; Sidd had his French horn case and his long stick. We embraced. They wandered slowly through the apartment. Debbie Sue was not sure about the stuffed animal heads.

  "What's the owner's name?"

  "Mullins. He's off shooting in Botswana."

  She suggested taking the heads down and storing them in a spare room during our occupancy, but the thought of opening the door onto such a dishevelment of glass eyes and antlers was even more disturbing. So she limited her discontent to talking and sympathizing with the heads on occasion as she walked by them.

  She loved standing by the windows and looking out on the East River. She wondered if anyone windsurfed out there. It was a crime if they didn't. Books were everywhere in the apartment-spilling out of shelves that rose to the ceiling. Debbie Sue wondered if they were all read.

  "Mullins is in the publishing business so he gets sent lots of books," I told her. I told her that Disraeli had once written to a friend who was always sending him books, "Thank you very much for sending me the book. I shall lose no time in reading it."

  Debbie Sue said, "Christ! Look at that cat!"

  The animal in question had ambled in from the neighboring rooms.

  "That's Mister Puss," I said. "We have a long letter about him. Part of the deal is that we're supposed to see that he's fed and entertained."

  "He's huge and wonderful. He's a trophy cat. I'm surprised they haven't shot him on sight!" She picked him up and gazed into his face. He lay in her arms like a sack.

  The morning after their arrival Sidd was asked to report to Shea Stadium. The Mets were not scheduled to play that day.

  He was picked up by car. The driver was not Elliot Posner, but it was like old times. The guy honked his horn under the windows that looked out on the street. Sidd spent four or five hours at Shea and the car brought him back after practice.

  I met him at the door. Debbie Sue was out shopping. We sat down in the living room, overlooking the river.

  "I pitch on Monday afternoon," he said. "The Cardinals from St. Louis are arriving in town."

  "How was your first day?"

  "They gave me a locker. They suggested I wear a shoe on my bare foot."

  I asked what that would do to his pitching.

  "Part of lung-gom is to know the body within," he said. "I discovered in the mountains that the perfect balance was better effected by not wearing anything on my left foot. I will continue to do so. I informed Mr. Johnson that I will pitch with my foot bare. I will be embarrassed. I have toes like a lobster claw."

  I assured him that a bare foot was nothing new in American sports. In football both the colleges and pros had a number of kickers who padded out to kick barefooted, even outdoors in sub-zero weather.

  I said, "But I wouldn't advise batting without wearing something on that foot. It's very easy to foul a ball straight down. Even with a shoe, it'll make you jump and yelp. When that happens the tradition in the dugout is for everyone in there to bark like dogs."

  "Yes," Sidd said. "The trainer has given me a shoe for batting. Also a helmet. I was shown how to kneel in the circle they call `the on-deck.' They have shown me the heavy ring that one slides on the bat to make it seem lighter. I had thought originally that the heavy ring was a talisman to bless the wood. No! One has only oneself to rely on within the confines of the batting box. They took me there. I have been shown how to knock the dirt from my spikes with the end of the bat and in what direction to face and so forth."

  "Was Ronn Reynolds pleased to see you?"

  "He seemed ... subdued. I know why. He is going to be the catcher against the Cardinals. I assured him that he has not a thing to be concerned about-that wherever he sets his glove as a target I will put the ball exactly into its pocket."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said, `What the hell happened at Huggins?' I apologized. I said it was a great exception. It was as rare as if a meteor had struck."

  "Did he calm down?"

  "Perhaps. He stared into the back of his locker."

  Debbie Sue arrived. We could hear her clattering up on the stairs and then the sound of her key turning in the lock. She was carrying a package.

  "I've bought something to wear to the game," she said brightly. "I went to Bonwit Teller. Guess what I said to the salesgirl? I said, `I'm going to a baseball game to see my lover pitch. What should I wear?' The salesgirl was French. She thought a cocktail dress would be nice."

  We had supper that night in the apartment. Sidd and Debbie Sue were curious about my writing. How was it coming along? Had I brought my typewriter up from Florida? I admitted that it was still sitting in the little side porch in Pass-a-Grille with the paper in it, shriveling in the humidity, no doubt. But I told them I had heard just the day before from Amory Blake, the therapist. He had written me a letter, which had been forwarded by the post office in Pass-a-Grille. He reported that he had sent his collection of strange facts to a New York publisher and it had been accepted! He had underlined "accepted" and put an exclamation point after it. A number of my suggestions had made their way into the final selection. These would be acknowledged in his introduction.

  I admitted to Sidd and Debbie Sue that it wasn't quite the same as producing the stuff myself, but it was a start. Didn't they think so? Debbie Sue nodded, but she said she was going to look around the apartment for a typewriter. Mullins was a publisher, after all; there had to be one somewhere. She would set it up and roll a fresh piece of paper into it.

  After dinner we fed Mister Puss, who had been described by Mr. Mullins in his note as a "digesting mechanism," and we pulled up chairs, Mister Puss supine in Debbie Sue's lap, to watch the evening come and the boats go by on the river.

  I was surprised how at ease Sidd seemed, considering his assignment coming up. Finally he asked, "Robert, I need your advice. It has been my observation," he said, "that a vast amount of chewing among baseball players goes on-tobacco, gum, especially a brand called Bazooka, sunflower seeds, and perhaps other substances. I have spotted a player who sports a toothpick at a cocky angle. Is it your opinion that I should cultivate one of these habits so I will not stand out among my fellows for not doing so?"

  When I asked if he had tried any of these things, he said that no, he was partial to an occasional peppermint -a Life Saver, the white variety, with the hole.

  I said that I had not heard of anyone in baseball who used peppermints, but since the whole idea was to keep the mouth from going dry from tension and stress, a peppermint seemed a logical choice-it was a matter of preference.

  I asked Sidd if the crowds expected at Shea the next afternoon would bother him. His preparation had been so isolated-the enclosures at Huggins-Stengel with three, or at the most, four people standing around to watch.

  Sidd replied that he wouldn't really know until he stood out there on the pitcher's mound. He would remind himself, if he had to, of a famous Zen story about a wrestler named 0-nami, which means "Great Wave," who was having that kind of trouble with his career-he couldn't wrestle in public. Crowds bothered him. In private he could throw his own teachers to the mat. But in public his own pupils humiliated and tossed him about. So he went to see a Zen master in a little temple set in a pleasant grove of trees that gave way to the beach and then to the sea.

  The Zen master said, "
Pray in this temple and imagine that you are the waves in the sea, huge waves sweeping everything before them...."

  So, O-nami sat in meditation. By the time it began to get dark he could hear the water sifting through the tree trunks in the temple garden and the surf beginning to break against the temple steps. Then the water foamed in through the door, spreading out across the temple floor, sweeping away the flowers in their vases. The water rose. Even the Buddha in the shrine was inundated, and by dawn in O-nami's mind the temple had gone and there was nothing but the ebb and flow of an immense sea.

  After a while the master appeared. He knew that 0- nami had succeeded in his meditation. He patted him on the shoulder and told him that now he was going to be unbeatable.

  Debbie Sue sighed. She said when she heard stories like this she always hoped for another ending ... that the wrestler would step into the ring and immediately get flattened. "Waves!" she said in disgust.

  Sidd smiled at her. I could see his throat muscles flutter and suddenly throughout the apartment we heard the sift and suck of water as if a huge tidal surge had risen out of the East River. Debbie Sue paled, and almost involuntarily she drew up her legs to keep her bare feet clear.

  XIII

  UST ABOUT everyone in the country remembers what they were doing when the word got out about Finch's afternoon in Shea Stadium. About fifteen thousand people were in the stands-an average summer afternoon crowd-and of course the number of people afterward who said they were there was up in the hundreds of thousands. Toward the end of the game, when it was evident what Finch was going to do, one of the major networks broke away to show the last innings at Shea. Viewers wrote angry letters, claiming that nothing should preempt Hollywood Squares or jeopardy-whatever program they were accustomed to watching at that time.

  Debbie Sue and I sat together in a pair of lower box seats on the first-base side behind the Mets dugout. The seats were provided by Jay Horwitz. Debbie Sue was not wearing the cocktail dress, thank goodness, but a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt that read "BOOM BOOM" where the diminutive mounds of her small breasts pushed against the material. She pointed at Darryl Strawberry's behind-he was shagging flies in the outfield-and said that she was going to invite him to the Duke spring prom.

  I had expected a larger crowd, but the Mets-remem- bering the confusion and skepticism following the April i press conference at Huggins-Stengel-had decided to announce Finch's assignment to pitch only just before the game. When Debbie Sue and I arrived twenty minutes before the teams took to the field, there was no sign of Sidd. We could see the Cardinal pitcher John Tudor warming up, but the Mets bull pen was deserted. Sidd had told me the night before that he saw no need to take any warmup pitches. He had told me why ... that in his snow-leopard days in the Himalayas, there was not much point in "warming up" since he never could tell when the leopards would sneak down and put in an appearance above the yak pens. It was a question of spotting them and quickly letting fly.

  Did I think it mattered? he wanted to know. Was "warming up" an important ritual in baseball that he had better adhere to?

  I had told him that it was of small consequence. I had once written a story about a top-flight English tennis player-a regular at Wimbledon in the fifties-who didn't see any point in warming up either (or "knocking up" as they say in England). "I don't knock up," she would say firmly to her opponent; she would sit and wait in her courtside chair while the officials hustled around for someone to go out and get the other person ready.

  We finally saw Sidd. He came out of the dugout after the national anthem. As he moved in his long farmer's gait to the pitcher's mound, his bare foot seemed luminous against the green grass. Debbie Sue pointed at an electric scoreboard. His name was up there as the starting pitcher for the Mets, predictably with one of the two d's of Sidd missing. An increasing murmur rose from around us -most likely at the realization on the crowd's part that Finch-whoever the hell he was-was shoeless on one foot.

  Sidd reached the pitcher's mound and looked down toward the plate. We waited. It was as if a great mechanism had stopped. Finally the umpire walked to the mound. Out there, Sidd must have told him he didn't bother with warm-up pitches, upon which, after staring at him for a second or so, and at his bare foot for just an instant, the umpire walked back to the plate, reaching for his little whisk broom in his rear pocket, and as he did so he waved the lead-off man into the batter's box.

  Sometimes in a stadium, if it is tense, and the place has a good crowd, enough people identify with the actual flight of the pitched ball to react audibly-an exhalation of breath-so that the pitch is accompanied by a slight whoomph. With the first ball Finch threw there was no time for any kind of reaction: we heard the slam of the ball driving the air out of the catcher's mitt with a high pop!-audible, I suspect, out in the parking lot beyond the center-field fence. This was followed by a high exclamation from Reynolds, a kind of squeak, as he stood up from his stance, reached into his glove, and began pulling the ball free. A gasp and then a prolonged murmur went up from the stands. The batter, Vince Coleman, had no idea how to react. His jaw dropped slightly. He looked down at the plate. The umpire raised his right hand slowly to indicate a strike-so slowly that he gave the impression of someone wondering exactly what evidence he himself was working on.

  As pitch followed pitch the astonishment at what we were seeing never seemed to diminish. Perhaps it was because it was such an unfathomable extension of the most common act in sports: all of us had seen pitchers wind up and throw a ball thousands of times. But here, the flight of the ball was barely discernible-a quick, white flash, almost a trick, a refraction of light; but the proof of what we had barely seen was emphasized by the sound of the ball exploding into Ronn Reynolds' glove. He was visibly tossed back by its impact. The umpire's hand came out to steady him. We saw the ball when he extricated it from his glove. When he threw it back to Finch it seemed as large as a moon.

  It was odd to watch someone so remarkably adept at hurling a baseball behave so awkwardly in other depart ments of the game. Sidd had a troublesome time catching the ball when Reynolds threw it back to him; indeed, the catcher finally resorted to a high-trajectory lob to get it safely into Sidd's possession. Sometimes Reynolds would forget and peg the ball back hard to Sidd, perhaps to give him just the slightest taste of what he himself was suffering behind the plate. Sidd, his eyes widening as if he had glimpsed something quite horrid, would duck to let the ball sail out over second base into center field.

  It didn't seem to bother him in the slightest-these displays of gawky clumsiness. Once the ball got back to the mound and he had control of it, he would set himself and stare kindly down at Reynolds, who would slowly raise his big catcher's mitt for a target, setting one leg behind the other, knowing that as soon as he was motionless, Sidd's bare foot would start for the heavens and the terrifying convulsion on the mound would begin.

  Debbie Sue was surprisingly quiet in the seat beside me. I had not been quite sure what to expect-most probably an overabundance of enthusiasm ("Come on, you Sidd!"), which would have attracted attention and embarrassed me. But there was none of this. She tended to fidget when Sidd walked out to the mound, and especially when his time came to go up to bat. She watched his every move, often through a pair of binoculars we had brought with us. Darryl Strawberry's behind got only a cursory glance. Midway through the game she said, "He's tired. I can see his lips moving."

  "He's repeating the ngags," I said.

  The Cardinals, one by one, came up for the time it took Sidd to throw three pitches. Some of them started to swing their bats when Sidd's bare foot reached its apex and the delivery, from far behind his head, was on its way. Some got into a stance to bunt-standing far back in the batter's box and poking their bats out into the air space above the plate in the hope that percentages would finally put the wood on the ball. I do not remember a foul. I began feeling sorry for the Cardinals. They had always been a favorite team-a passion that went back to a childhood appreciat
ion of the design on their uniforms-the two birds, paintred, standing on the slant of a bat. My sister used to say that it was the most "bovine" reason for liking a team, but there it was.

  In the seventh inning Whitey Herzog, the Cardinals manager (whose team was behind 3-0 on a Mookie Wilson home run in the sixth), came out and complained about Sidd's toes. He pointed out that high in the air, the toes were distracting the hitters-just as illegal (Herzog insisted) as a tattered sleeve on a pitcher's jersey; he would protest the game unless something was done about it. Herzog flailed his arms and fanned his fingers to illustrate Sidd's leg action and what the toes looked like, and the dirt streaming out of them, and so forth, and it must have been convincing because the umpire concurred and called Davey Johnson out of the dugout. Sidd disappeared into the clubhouse and came out wearing a white sock on his bare foot. To me, sitting in the stands, the sock, often flopping at the end of his foot, seemed a more disconcerting sight pointed high in the sky than the bare toes, but then I wasn't speaking from firsthand experience.

  What many in the crowd remembered that afternoon were the four times Sidd Finch came to bat. It was evident enough that he had never done such a thing-at least in a game. He had skipped pregame batting practice. Indeed, Davey Johnson reported afterward that Finch had sat down next to him at the bottom of the third inning, with his first time-at-bat coming up, and asked, "Is it absolutely mandatory that I go up to bat? I would as soon eschew it."