The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  They drove along in silence for a while. "Are you from a monastery around here?" the driver asked. "What's the order? A Carmelite or something?"

  Sidd felt the thing to do was to tell him everything ... perhaps the driver would get caught up in the spirit of the occasion and drive him all the way to Shea Stadium.

  "My name is Sidd Finch," he said.

  The driver smiled and introduced himself. "Tom Smarts." Apparently the name Finch had no discernible impact.

  "I'm supposed to be working for the Mets against the St. Louis Cardinals tonight," Sidd went on.

  "You're the team chaplain! Well, I'm not a baseball follower," the driver said. "I'm into antiques." He went on to say that for someone of his limited means, antiques was a hopeless passion. He had one good piece in his house-a gilt eighteenth-century chair-but the rest of the stuff was Danish modem.

  Sidd listened politely. Then the driver said, "I take it that the Mets will have you in there before the game to lead them in prayer. Is that it? The Mets need divine guidance? They'll all gather around you in the corner of the locker room?"

  "I guess that's what would happen," Sidd said. "I've never-"

  "So this is your first time out," the driver exclaimed. "Your first pregame service! Quite a day for you."

  The dog kept peering in the back window of the cab, his tongue lolling, and staring through the glass at Sidd. Very likely he had caught a whiff of Sidd's blanket as he was climbing into the truck. The driver looked over. "My dog's taken quite a liking to you," he said. "Do you keep dogs at home?"

  Sidd shook his head.

  "What's your order?" the driver asked. "I hope you don't mind my asking." He looked him over. "It doesn't look as though they allow you very much in life. Not even shoes."

  "I'm what they call a trapa," Sidd said. "Which is an aspirant Buddhist monk."

  "For God's sake!" the driver exclaimed. "Is that right? How many Buddhists do they have on the Mets?" he asked.

  Sidd said, "Perhaps you would let me explain." He began with his religious training in the Himalayas, and how by lung-gom and pegging rocks at snow leopards he had learned to throw with speed and accuracy. He talked about his tryout with the Mets, and his uncertainty about baseball and his future.

  From time to time the driver beat the palm of a hand in a rapid tattoo on the steering wheel. "Well, doesn't that beat all?" he said.

  Sidd did not describe what had happened in the Mullins apartment the night before-since it was so unclear to him-but he said that, because of the various circumstances, he had fallen asleep in the back of a station wagon that had deposited him just hours before in Tuxedo Park, New York, and how this very night he was scheduled to take the mound and pitch against the St. Louis Cardinals.

  The driver smacked the steering wheel. "Well, doesn't that ... To think I thought you were a priest! I've had all kinds of people up here in the cab with me-did I tell you about the calliope guy and the foot fetishist?-but this is the climax!"

  The upshot was that Mr. Smarts drove Sidd directly to Shea Stadium. He said he was going to lock Ralph in the cab, try to buy himself a ticket, and see a baseball game for the first time in twenty-five years.

  Sidd's appearance at the locker-room door created a stir. The players looked up from their locker stalls to see him walk in barefooted with the horse blanket wrapped around him. Mookie Wilson leaned out from his stool and whispered to Ray Knight, "He's not only got the worst body I ever saw, but the man dresses real bad...."

  I HE METS telephoned us a little after three that afternoon to say that Sidd had arrived at the ballpark. He was in the clubhouse and wanted us to know that he was okay. The man on the phone could only tell us that Sidd had been in Tuxedo Park. He didn't know why. Yes, he was pitching that evening as scheduled. The Mets had tickets for us that we could pick up at the press gate.

  That morning Debbie Sue had been frantic.

  "Where the hell is he? The thing is-Sidd doesn't know how to do anything," she'd complained. "He doesn't know enough to pick up a phone and call collect. He doesn't know our number here. He doesn't know how to call Information for the Mullins number." She had stared at the phone.

  "He knows enough to get along," I'd assured her. "He got along in the Himalayas."

  Debbie Sue had snorted. "Tumo-heat isn't going to help him out in the streets. He went out of here practically naked...."

  Debbie Sue and I left for Shea about six o'clock in my sister's car. We turned on the radio. The happenings the night before were mentioned in brief on the news programs. The day's tabloids had described it as some kind of Mafia in-family squabble: both of the men arrested were low-echelon mob figures. Why the shoot-out took place in an East Side apartment was still under investi gation. Caporetto's police record got much more play than Noodles McGuire. It was mentioned that he had been arrested for aggravated assault in an Astoria coffee shop. None of the papers or radio stations made any connection between what happened in the Mullins apartment and Sidd Finch.

  His association with baseball, however, was a main topic on the car radio. The announcement that Sidd was going to pitch on Thursday caused a mild stir. Usually pitchers work on a rotation of four to five days between outings. Johnson told reporters that his rotation was shot ... in need of a respite. Sidd was an exceptional case: he was willing to pitch and buy time for the rest of the staff. Debbie Sue paused at the station on which two exballplayers were chatting about Sidd's fastball. One of them was saying that speed wasn't that important. Rex Barney, for example, threw the ball well up in the hundreds, a terrifying thing to see from the stands, but it was easy to hit because the ball didn't move. It was a hard dart. You could get away with something like that in the minors, but if you throw it, two strikes and three balls in the majors, that hard dart would get itself thumped. Robin Roberts, on the other hand, threw in the nineties, but his fastball jerked around on the way in, and you could almost feel the wood of the bench on your ass because that was where you were going back to. They talked about Barney and Roberts and some of the others with a kind of nostalgia. "Yeah, Rex," a voice reminisced. "If the plate was located high and inside, he would have been a thirtygame winner."

  Johnny VanderMeer's name came up. He had pitched two no-hitters in a row for the Cincinnati Reds, considered, along with Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six-game consecutive hitting streak, to be the most unassailable records in baseball. Now look ...

  "How do you think Sidd'll pitch?" I asked Debbie Sue over the chatter of the car radio.

  She didn't answer for a while. "He must be rattled," she said finally. "What's in Tuxedo, anyway? Why do you think he went there?"

  "It's a very posh community about an hour upstate," I said. "The tuxedo-the dinner jacket-gets its name from the place."

  "Do you think he knows anybody in Tuxedo?" she asked. "He wasn't wearing anything when he left the apartment."

  She was obviously flustered.

  "You're not jealous?"

  "I don't like him running off like that."

  The traffic was heavy. A number of the parking lots around Shea were already filled. "They've come out in force," I said. We drove under the subway trestle looking for a place to park.

  "Up there's where you get the Number Seven back to the city, isn't it?" Debbie Sue asked.

  I was surprised. "You're getting to be quite the New Yorker," I said.

  We parked by the tennis stadium. She took my hand as we walked toward Shea. "Owl, you've been the best thing that ever happened to us," she said. "Look!" The Goodyear blimp was drifting low over the ballpark, the hum of its motors audible, the lights of the "Skytacular" faint in the soft mist of the night. I thought back on the morning Smitty had telephoned in Pass-a-Grille. Perhaps he himself was up there piloting, the big wheel alongside his seat, and thinking of the leather bag and Stottlemyre leaning out that early spring day and dropping the baseballs.

  Our seats were behind the Mets dugout, about thirty rows back. We caught a glimpse of Sidd. He came out
of the dugout and looked back into the stands as if he were searching for us. Debbie Sue jumped up and waved, but he gave no indication of having spotted us. He looked disheveled and lost.

  "He looks tired," Debbie Sue was saying. "What do you think went on in Tuxedo Park?"

  The umpires came out. We stood for the national anthem. The Mets took the field, and Sidd Finch made his appearance out of the dugout, striding slowly for the mound. The crowd rose and gave him a solid roar of appreciation. On reflection, it was more the kind of response inspired by the entrance of a famous foreign dignitary. Or a new model tank in a military parade. The applause was respectful, but not loving. When Sidd stepped up to the mound and peered down at Ronn Reynolds, the crowd was almost silent, nervous, and even the high bird cries of the vendors were muted as they slid the straps off their shoulders and set down their boxes to watch.

  At that first explosive pitch-the evidence of its power more noticeable in the galvanic jolt that hit Ronn Reynolds than in the barely visible streak of the ball itselfan exhalation of astonishment went up-many times more magnified than what we had heard at the afternoon game. We heard it eight more times, eight more titanic gasps, and then Sidd-the side retired-stalked off the mound for the dugout. He had been out there less than four minutes.

  The Mets did not score in their half of the inning, though Keith Hernandez hit a long drive, caught up against the Mets bull pen fence with two of his teammates aboard.

  Sidd came up in the next inning. I watched him in the on-deck circle, occasionally looking back over his shoulder into the stands behind first base as if still searching for us. I had warned him not to touch a rosin bag. He poked at the one in the on-deck circle with the end of his bat.

  He had picked up a number of mannerisms in his days of practice at Shea. At the plate he first tapped the dirt from his spikes and then dug a little toehold in the rear of the batter's box. He reached out and solemnly tapped the plate three times with the end of his bat and then looked out at the pitcher from under the brim of his cap. He stood stolidly at the plate. He struck out swiftly and clumsily.

  The game turned out to be a classic pitchers' duel, though the contrast between the halves of each inning was striking. Bob Forsch, the Cardinals' big right-hander, was involved almost from his first pitch of the game in a lengthy drama of his own making-complex, tactical, with the best refinements of baseball on view; there were brilliant fielding plays-Willie McGee slapping up against the blue fence to pull down a long drive; even the Mets' supporters rose to applaud the Cardinals' defensive skills as they trotted in off the field.

  Then Sidd walked out to the mound. He stood waiting quietly. Reynolds came along a little later. No need for him. No warm-up pitches. He stood at the plate briefly while the infielders finished throwing the ball around the horn-as we used to say-and then one of them lobbed the ball underhand to Sidd so he could proceed. The whole character of what we were watching changed. It wasn't that what was happening was uninteresting, or lacking in intensity. Sidd's half of the inning was so quick-at least in the earlier part of the game-that one strained to capture what was going on ... as if to imprint a glimpse of an incredible treasure before the door closed on it.

  Some concentrated on Sidd-the whirlwind delivery, the tip of the sock dangling high above his head, the catapult action, the ball that stretched like a silver thread into Ronn Reynolds' glove-trying to divine how it all worked. Others watched Reynolds-because it was at his position that the power of Sidd's delivery was most noticeable-as if the catcher had been hit by a jolt of electrical power ... knocking him back toward the umpire, who often put a hand out to keep Reynolds upright. We studied the batters' attitudes-some of them wondrously cool, as if nothing untoward was happening, gazing out at Finch with their jaws working evenly on gum or whatever, swinging the bat menacingly over the plate, as if it were almost a surety that they could poke the next offering up into the left-field seats. Others were more shaken. After the first pitch zipped by, they stared in bewilderment, first at the plate, then back at the catcher; they watched the ball, its properties now defined as it was arched back to Finch. They looked over their shoulders into the dugout, where the faces of their teammates lined along the top step were as non-committal as a jury's; they inched away from the plate in spite of themselves; their rear ends stuck out more prominently.

  The game went into the seventh inning without either the Mets or the Cardinals able to score.

  As in his first game, Sidd looked increasingly exhausted as the innings went on. He paused for longer intervals between pitches, waiting for the energy to flow back in. Once refreshed, his body swayed, his leg, the dusty sock at the end of it, rose stiffly toward the night sky, and the delivery-mesmerizing to watch-uncoiled and the ball tore for the plate. There was no question of pacing the pitch itself. It was as if any slackening or shift in how the mechanism functioned would damage the whole.

  The Cardinals tried to throw off his timing. Just before Sidd's leg started that awesome hoist into the sky, the batter would back out. The umpire called time. The Cardinal stood with his back to Sidd. After the bat boy had dashed out with the chamois cloth, he would dust off his bat handle with slow, infinite care, as if polishing a piece of antique furniture.

  It struck me as a terrifying strategy, since the consequences could well affect Sidd's control rather than his speed. Dr. Burns had warned us at the Huggins confer ence in March that it was essential never to disturb a lung-gom in the process of his work. What was it that he had said-that a devil would shake the lung-gom and deprive him of his senses?

  To do this with Sidd could well mean that his pitch would once again become a "thing of Chaos and Cruelty."

  The memory of what had happened-the rip in the canvas backstop, the ricochet off the iron pipe into the alligator pond-scared me so much that I thought of somehow getting a note to Whitey Herzog, the Cardinals manager, to warn him that this tactic was endangering his batters. My fingers itched to write. I could dash off what Mike Marshall had said: "We're talking death here." I nudged Debbie Sue.

  "Have you got a pencil?"

  "What?"

  "And a piece of paper? I've got to get a note to the Cardinals."

  Debbie Sue stared at me. "Oh, Owl, you're kidding me. You've decided to write? Right at this moment ...?"

  Just then a great roar went up from the crowd. Vince Coleman, the fleet Cardinal outfielder, who was leading off in the seventh inning and had two strikes on him, swung late and missed a pitch that was, incredibly, slightly off target-hitting the side of Ronn Reynolds' catcher's mitt, twisting it cruelly on his wrist, and bouncing off at right angles toward the third-base seats. Coleman, though a strikeout victim, was free to run on a dropped third strike. He lit out for first, made a wide turn, and reached second with a nifty slide-the first base runner of the game for the Cardinals.

  "Sidd's control's going," I whispered.

  Debbie Sue was staring ahead, her hands twisting in her lap.

  The next batter was Willie McGee, the switch-hitting outfielder. I remember Coleman down at second drawing on a pair of red golfing gloves, which he wears to protect his hands on slides, arms outstretched for the bag.

  It was obvious he was going to steal third. Sidd had no idea how to hold him at second base. He peered bleakly back over his shoulder once or twice and then, with a full windup, he delivered his fastball past McGee. By the time Reynolds had extricated the ball from the pocket of his catcher's mitt, Coleman was standing down on third, the crowd howling, knowing that despite Finch's mastery, he was in danger of falling behind in the game if Coleman could get home to break the scoreless tie.

  "He's going to go," I whispered to Debbie Sue. "Right now." We watched Coleman inch down the base path toward home plate, his red gloves bright as he poised them off his hips.

  I could see Sidd's lips moving on his ngags, a flash of white-perhaps a peppermint on the tip of his tongueand then his stockinged foot twitched and rose in the air.

 
Coleman broke for the plate.

  Ronn Reynolds shifted his glove from the inside corner to the ground on the third-base side of the plate. It must have been a terrifying moment for him-trusting that Finch could readjust in the middle of his delivery and throw the ball to a different target.

  The ball hit the pocket of his glove with a wallop and stuck. He yelped yet again, not so much from the pain as from the excitement.

  The umpire, leaning over his shoulder, could see the mitt at the corner of the plate, the white of the ball in it, and one of Coleman's red gloves sailing into view like the flick of a tongue. He pumped his right hand up in the air. Coleman was out. Sidd got McGee and Herr on strikes, and the inning was done.

  Perhaps conscious that their pitcher was fading (although he got himself safely through the top of the eighth), the Mets got a run in their half of the inning. A walk. A sacrifice. Then Ray Knight, pinch-hitting, socked a ball deep into the gap in right center and was thrown out trying to stretch the hit into a triple. The run scored in front of him.

  Debbie Sue looked at her watch. She seemed subdued. I nudged her and said that Sidd had only nine pitches to go. For the top of the ninth inning that enormous crowd rose from their seats as if standing for the national anthem.

  Whitey Herzog put in a pinch hitter for the twenty-fifth man at the plate-I've forgotten who the fellow was. You could look it up. A left-handed batter. Like almost all those in the lineup who had preceded him, he took three quickswinging strikes, as if he had been ordered to get his bat into the strike zone where a chance connection between it and the ball might occur. I noticed he was peeking back, quite illegally, to try to see where Reynolds was setting the glove for a target. Two outs to go.