The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  I don't recall the twenty-sixth batter either. I kept staring at the twenty-seventh waiting in the on-deck circleperhaps because I knew he was almost surely destined to be the final out of the game. He was Terry Pendleton, pinch-hitting for the Cardinal pitcher who had come in during the Mets' little flurry in the eighth. Pendleton wears two black gloves and a guard on his right forearm. One knee was on a pad to keep his pants leg from getting dusty. He was swinging his bat, weighted with an iron ring, with a nonchalance that belied the fact that twentyfive of his teammates had struck out before him and the twenty-sixth was about to do so, flapping his bat jerkily and futilely as the third strike streamed by him. The crowd noise at the twenty-sixth strikeout was immense. Pendleton seemed hardly aware as the twenty-sixth strode by him on his way to the Cardinal dugout. He stood up and pounded the handle end of the bat on the ground to dislodge the iron ring-as if ridding his bat of a giant parasite. He leaned over and, with his bat between his knees, dusted the bat handle with the chamois cloth. On his way to the plate he never glanced up at Sidd until he had settled himself carefully in the batter's box.

  As every schoolboy knows, it was at this point that Sidd, after a long look down at Reynolds and Pendleton, bent over and placed the baseball next to the pitching rubber, putting it there very carefully, even fastidiously, as if it were as delicate as a seashell. He then took off that decrepit black glove of his, stuck it under his arm, and walked off the mound. As he headed for the Mets dugout, the first assumption was that he had something to ask Davey Johnson or Mel Stottlemyre. I myself thought he was going into the dugout to get himself a Band-Aid, or perhaps replace his sock. When those who could see into the dugout saw him disappear into the tunnel leading back to the locker room, they must have guessed he was rushing back to the lavatory.

  We waited. The umpire came out behind home plate and peered into the Mets dugout. Seated back in the lower box seats, I could not see what was going on in there, but I was told later that the first indication of something untoward was when the Mets on the bench began streaming back under the stands, presumably to find out what had happened to Sidd. Out beyond the right-field fence two pitchers began getting ready. The quick movements of their arms flashed above the fence. The stadium crowd, their bewilderment a loud hum, must have come to the conclusion that Sidd, pitching at that incredible speed inning after inning, had finally done in the rotator cuff or whatever. He was hurt.

  I looked over to wonder aloud to Debbie Sue what had happened. Her seat was empty.

  Jesse Orosco finished up the game. Pendleton looped a single over second base, the first time a ball had touched a Cardinal bat, but then Porter hit a two-hopper down the line to Ray Knight at third, who threw him out at first. That won the game for the Mets i-o. The crowd noise had not varied since Sidd had walked off the mound-a strong and steady buzz of bewilderment.

  In the melee of reporters in the back corridors, I managed to find Jay Horwitz. His large, melancholy face seemed to float among the shoulders of people shouting at him. He disengaged himself and we shuffled ourselves through the crowd into a corner. "No sign of him," he said to me. "He got back in the clubhouse, grabbed that weird green blanket, and was gone. The clubhouse boy saw him. Davey Johnson saw him just for a second in the corridor. There's nothing in his locker except a bunch of hangers. His `batting' shoe was found under the dugout bench."

  "What was he doing in Tuxedo Park?" I asked.

  "Damned if I know," Jay said. "He came into the clubhouse this afternoon with his head stuck through that blanket. No money. No nothing. He had a helluva time talking himself into the stadium. Somebody finally recognized him. Where's his girl?"

  "She disappeared in the ninth inning," I said. "I turned around and she was gone."

  For a while I stood in the back of the interview room, where a throng of reporters were shouting at Davey Johnson.

  "You saw him after he walked off the mound?"

  "That's right. Back in the corridor behind the dugout."

  "Davey, what happened? What'd he say?"

  "I asked him what the trouble was. He shrugged. His shoulders went up and down. He apologized. He said he would call me. It seems to me there was a girl standing close by. They ran off down the corridor."

  "Davey, what did you do?"

  "Well, if you want to know the truth, I watched them go. Off into the sunset."

  "Davey! Davey!"

  "I don't know what else I could've done. You expect me to tackle the guy? We got the game. We got Orosco in the bull pen. One out to go. What's the big deal?"

  "He had a perfect game, Davey!"

  "That's his concern. For me, it's a practical matter."

  "Davey! Davey!"

  "Any guy that leaves me with a i-o lead and one out to go, and he wants to go boating in Central Park, I say okay."

  "Hey, Davey. He's gone boating ...?"

  "I didn't say that. I was-"

  "Is he coming back?"

  "He didn't say."

  "Davey, any idea it was going to happen ... ?"

  Johnson nodded slowly. "I had an idea. But I didn't know he had such a dramatic sense of timing."

  I left for the parking lot. I looked for Debbie Sue. I stood by the car as the parking lot emptied, half expecting to spot her striding across the asphalt with Sidd in tow.

  I worried about her. Although resourceful, she was scatterbrained enough to get into any number of fixes. No sight of her. The parking lot stretched off toward its boundary fences, symmetric pools of light under the lamp standards, until finally just a few automobiles were left here and there in that vast landscape, seemingly abandoned, as if their engines had been lifted during the game.

  I drove back to the city and let myself into the apartment. I walked through the darkness to the library to turn on the television set and see what news there was of the night game ... or Sidd. Nightline was on. Its host, Ted Koppel, was talking to a high-ranking Egyptian.

  The phone began buzzing in the darkness.

  "We've been calling and calling!" My pulse jumped at the sound of Debbie Sue's voice. She was with Sidd. She said they were waiting at Kennedy airport to board a flight to London. "I've disguised Sidd," Debbie Sue said. "He's wearing a huge pair of black glasses."

  "London?"

  "Isn't that wild?"

  She apologized for deserting me at the game. Hand in hand, they had run through the parking lots, down the lanes of cars, for the subway, the Number Seven, which they had taken into Manhattan, Sidd enveloped in his blanket. At the subway entrance they caught a taxi to the Mullins apartment, where they had picked up their belongings, the French horn and so forth, and after saying good-bye to the cat they had hurried out to Kennedy.

  "It was funny in the subway going into town," Debbie Sue said. "Sidd was sitting there with his blanket and his baseball uniform on, one baseball shoe and then his white sock on the other foot. No one seemed at all bothered. Everyone looks straight ahead in New York subways, don't they, Owl?"

  "Yes," I said. "They're scared of looking down the line and seeing someone dressed like Sidd."

  I asked why they hadn't let me in on it. I could have driven them directly to the airport with their belongings already in the car.

  Debbie Sue said that I mustn't be upset but that it was their adventure. It was an act of independence that they had to do on their own.

  Sidd came on the phone. "Namas-te," he said softly. I had to move the receiver closer to my ear to hear him. "I hope we have not caused you too much consternation."

  "Well, you startled everyone," I said. "I hear you threw Mister Puss."

  "I regret to say that he was the only implement I was able to find," Sidd said. "I did not throw him overhand. I sort of shoveled him down the stairwell."

  He told me something about his adventures to and from Tuxedo and about Mr. Smarts, the Good Samaritan driver who had taken him to Shea.

  "He was very accommodating," Sidd said. "He picks up everybody. Calliope players."
/>
  "What about the Mets?" I asked.

  Sidd said that he had spoken briefly to Davey Johnson in the corridor and then he had called him up from the Mullins apartment. "They put me through to him," Sidd said. "He was still in his office. He was surprised. He said, `Hey, where'd you go?' I told him that I was going to the airport. I gave him a couple of mantras to use for the season next year. They should do very well, the Mets, perhaps not this year, but there is a karma that I suspect will lead them to a championship. I told him I had given a mantra to Ray Knight, and also one to Ron Darling, the pitcher who had studied Zen and knew exactly what I was talking about."

  "What did he say to all of this?" I asked.

  "He listened, quite carefully, I think. Then I told him that if he needed me the following season, in 1986, I would entertain the notion of coming back and rejoining the team. He laughed and said that was very thoughtful of me but that he would try to get the team off to a very good start so that I would not be needed. Perhaps the World Series. I think he wants me to return to my studies ... or whatever."

  "Did you tell him why you walked off the mound?"

  "No."

  "Did he know you weren't going to stick around?"

  "Oh, I think so," Sidd said. "I think he knew I wasn't going to be a permanent fixture."

  Debbie Sue came back on. She said the plane was boarding. They would call me from London. "Owl-love, we're going to turn on the trains. Sidd's buying a suit."

  XIX

  _ STAYED in the Mullins apartment for a few days-Mister Puss and I. Then I arranged for the schoolteacher living in the apartment upstairs to come in and feed him until the Mullins family came back from Botswana. I also told the superintendent he might want to do something about plugging up the bullet holes in the secondfloor ceiling. Then I went to Marblehead for a weekend of sailing with my family aboard the Salty IV. My father carried his unlit pipe upside down in his mouth, still in place as he told me to trim the genoa just a tad. We sat in the galley at night, comfortable in some quiet harbor.

  My father had watched the second Cardinals game on television. He could hardly believe Sidd had been a kind of ward of mine.

  "He stayed with you? Why don't I know these things?" he asked. "You should have invited them aboard for a cruise."

  Across the dial of the portable radio there was still a lot of chatter about Sidd, especially why he had walked off the pitcher's mound. There was even talk of an official inquiry.

  "Why would they want that?" my sister asked. She poured us coffee into mugs decorated with bright yachtclub flags. I wondered if Mr. Scranton, the toby-jug man, was still planning on a Finch model.

  "Sorry?"

  "Well, I was curious ... why an official inquiry?" my sister repeated.

  "Some people may have pressured Sidd in some way," I said. It's hard to believe he'd do such a thing on his own -leave baseball like that."

  "What kind of people?"

  "The Establishment, for one-the baseball crowd. After all, he was upsetting the balance of the game. Then you've got the bookmakers. Maybe even the Mob. Those guys didn't like him hanging around. Even the umpires can't be happy. With him, they have to rely on intuition rather than judgment-on their ears more than their eyes. The fact is, for baseball, Sidd was the worst kind of pariah."

  "So you think he was pressured out of the game?" my father asked.

  "I don't think so," I said carefully. "Anyone who's gone through the rigors of that lung-gom training would be pretty stubborn."

  I told them a story about Milarepa's obduracy, which Sidd had mentioned enough to us to make me think it meant something particular. It was about Milarepa visiting a monastery from which the monks-who didn't like him, to put it mildly-came running out and beat him savagely. "Go a-way! Go a-way!" They thought they'd gotten rid of him, but no, they looked around and there he was inside their temple. Once in, they couldn't get him out. He wasn't going to move until he wanted to. It was as if he had suddenly become a huge piece of sculpture. They put ropes on him, and a long line of monks, all sweating and heaving, like a tug-of-war game, just couldn't get him to budge an inch along the temple floor. They finally gave up. He sang to them and a lot of them became his disciples.

  I told them that when Sidd finished the story, he made the sounds of the monks grunting and straining as they tried to haul Milarepa out of their temple.

  My sister was fascinated by Sidd's skill with sounds. She bemoaned that she hadn't gone to the Himalayas to learn such a thing rather than spending three months in The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to paint.

  I nodded. "It's really uncanny. He could sit down here with us in the galley and flutter his throat muscles in some way, and you'd swear from the squeak of oarlocks that someone outside was rowing by in the night. He could have made a living at it. A cabaret act. He could have put together a routine of his best sounds-taxi horns, tubs emptying, a glass breaking on the floor, the echoes of trumpets, things like that, and then the audience'd call up requests. `Do a golf ball dropping into a cup.' "

  "That doesn't sound like the sort of thing he'd do," my father said with a smile.

  "I agree." I was embarrassed. "I never mentioned it to him. It's the last thing he'd do."

  "Did you ever ask him why he walked off the mound?" my sister asked.

  "No. I never really had the chance," I said. "But he would have answered almost surely with a koan, which is a kind of puzzle that can't be solved logically. He left a koan for his roommate when he quit Harvard. The note read, `How do you get the live goose out of the bottle? There, it's out!' "

  "But there's got to be a practical reason," my sister insisted. "It would have been a perfect game."

  "Perfection seems to have its problems," my father said. He was reminded of buying an Indian blanket in the Southwest. He had praised its perfect symmetry, but the Indian who had sold it to him shook his head and told him that the practice was always to weave a few mistakes into a blanket. Perfection meant trying to match the gods, and it was important not to do that. Arrogance.

  My father began tapping the bowl of his pipe into the palm of his hand, an unconscious and somewhat inconsequential habit since he hadn't smoked the thing in years.

  "That's an interesting idea," I said. I told them that Sidd seemed fascinated with unfinished works of art-his preoccupation with Dennis Brain and the Mozart horn concerto, and how he played it for us the night before he pitched at Shea.

  "He once said that there were a great number of ways to reach tharpa, or supreme liberation," I said. "Sometimes one achieves tharpa by not reaching the goal. Sometimes there are more important goals than the one that is visible. Not to give oneself the twenty-seventh K is a possibility."

  "What's a K?" my sister asked.

  "A strikeout. It's what you put in the little box in a scorecard."

  "The twenty-seventh K," she repeated. "That's a nice title for a book. Your book. Why don't you write something about all this?"

  "Don't badger him," my mother said, somewhat to my surprise.

  "Maybe he'd find out why Sidd behaved the way he did," she commented.

  "Perhaps Sidd should write the book," my mother said. "Or Debbie Sue."

  My father asked if I had seen Sidd and Debbie Sue after the game.

  I described how I had sat next to Debbie Sue but that she had suddenly disappeared during the ninth inning. I looked around and she wasn't there. She had gone to meet Sidd. They must have decided what they wanted to do a few days before.

  "I had no idea what they were up to," I said. "I thought I'd find them back at the apartment. They telephoned from the airport just as I walked in the door."

  I described how after our phone conversation I had wandered through the apartment into their bedroom. Sidd's Mets uniform was laid out on the front-room bedthe baseball shoe, a single one, propped up, its toe toward the ceiling. Debbie Sue's work. It gave me quite a start when I first saw it. A note lying on it. A koan! I thought. The note said-and
it was in Sidd's monastery writing"Please Return to Nelson Doubleday."

  "He's gone secular," my sister remarked with a grin. "What are they doing now?" she asked.

  "They're in London," I said. "Sidd's going to buy a suit. "

  "Do you think he has any regrets?" she asked.

  "He felt very strongly about the game," I said. "I think he wanted to stay in it. He kept asking me about players who had been overwhelming forces-Babe Ruth, Henry Aaron, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Sadaharu Oh ... a guy called Steve Dalkowski, who threw the ball faster than anyone until Sidd came along. I don't think he wanted to be on a pedestal by himself."

  I said, "I'll tell you something that has occurred to me once or twice. During the game I noticed Sidd occasionally glancing at the outfield scoreboard. I assumed he was doing what pitchers often do-checking on the count. But then I realized that such things were of small practical value to him. Perhaps he was checking on the time! There's a digital clock out there."

  "Why the time?" my sister asked.

  "They had to catch a plane to Europe," I said. "The last Pan Am flight for London leaves at one. They had to get back to New York, pack up in the Mullins apartment, say good-bye to the cat, and get to Kennedy airport. Maybe Debbie Sue said to him, `Now, Sidd, I want you to stop doing whatever you're doing at ten-thirty sharp.' "

  "That's the most farfetched reason I ever heard!" she said.

  "He stopped pitching right on the half hour," I said. "I happened to notice."

  "A coincidence."

  "I'll give you a more plausible possibility," I said. "That is, that Sidd suddenly realized he was losing it-his control, his concentration. So he put the ball down and walked off the mound rather than endanger anyone. It had happened once before in Florida. And here was Coleman, the Cardinal base runner, nagging him ... waving two red gloves and doing his best to disconcert him. In fact, I got so frightened that I nudged Debbie Sue and asked her for a pencil. If you can believe it, I was going to try to get a message into the Cardinal dugout to warn the manager to calm Coleman down."