The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  He told me it had been the strangest assignment of his career as a blimp pilot. When the Enterprise was up in the New York area for the summer months, he took up photographers. "I take them out to photograph the Statue of Liberty. They lean out the windows. They click away. They don't throw things, though. Jesus! Baseballs!"

  Sure enough, the next morning I got a call from the Mets office. I answered the phone quite quickly for me. They asked if I would come down and see Mr. Cashen at Huggins-Stengel Field. I told them why not. It was a pleasant spring day. I had nothing really to do until the afternoon.

  My days were carefully structured. I kept a master chart, marked out on the back of a cardboard box, listing various tasks to keep me occupied and my mind off things. That afternoon I was scheduled to stroll down to the marina to look at the yachts. Kids fished there in the black water that sluiced and sucked slowly back and forth between the piles, and sometimes they'd catch a big drum, a fish with large scales and striped black and white markings. Elderly fishermen turned up there, too, with exact rituals, a collapsible stool that they snapped open and settled their haunches onto, precariously perched it always seemed to me, and they gazed at the tips of their poles, waiting for the quiver of the line. Close by the stool they kept live shrimp in a galvanized pail; sometimes they opened up a fishing box and, rummaging among its trays, pulled out a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. It was comforting to spend a couple of hours among them.

  But that morning I was only supposed to water the little plot of grass behind the bungalow and put some feed in the fish pond at the back of the property. It was the least interesting morning during the week, though I had learned to pass a pleasant hour or so slowly revolving to direct the spray from the hose and feeling the cool of the water against my thumb.

  So I skipped the morning schedule and I drove out to Huggins-Stengel Field. I knew the way. I had done a couple of stories that had taken me there. Huggins (the players drop the Stengel when they refer to it) is where the varsity, or the "A" squad, moves over in early March from the Payne Whitney complex on the other side of town. It's their home base until the big tin equipment trunks are packed and everyone moves north. Huggins is comparatively small-two baseball diamonds set down in a pleasant suburban area of St. Petersburg, with an artificial lake that once had alligators in it beyond the chain fence. In one corner of the complex is a giant pale-blue water tower with a circular staircase rising in a curl around the supporting pillar. Up on the vast bubblelike water container various slogans are painted, and when I arrived a crew was painting out a message that Mary Lou Loves Duke-a stirring thought since one had to assume that a girl had been up there at that dizzying height doing the letters. They had just started painting over the ar of Mary.

  The clubhouse was a stablelike one-storied building. Frank Cashen had his office in one corner. I was ushered in. Ruddy-faced, wearing a seersucker jacket and the same bow tie he had worn the day before, Cashen smiled and motioned me to a chair. His office was almost barren-an ugly potted plant in the corner and two baseball trophies on a side table. A corner window looked out on Huggins-Stengel, where a few players were shagging flies.

  After we chatted a while Cashen asked, "Well, what did you make of yesterday?"

  "You mean that business of throwing baseballs out of the blimp?"

  He nodded.

  "I thought it was very entertaining. It's not something you see every day."

  "No."

  "It's better being up in the blimp, isn't it? I wouldn't care to have a baseball suddenly drop down out of the sky, much less try to catch the thing."

  "You saw the ballplayers down there?"

  "One or two," I said. "Yes, I didn't recognize anyone, if that's what you mean. We were pretty high up. But I saw their gloves, big ones, catcher's gloves I had to assume."

  "Do you have any idea why?"

  I paused a second. Then I said, "At the time I thought you had picked a very unusual way of training your outfielders. But then I wondered what had happened to the good old fungo bat, and of course there was the question of the catcher's mitts ... why were they all wearing them? And besides, what kind of fly ball would be coming down from a height of a thousand feet? So my theory didn't make much sense."

  I did not mention a curious fancy that had occurred to me the night before as I was trying to get to sleep-that the Mets had devised a weird kind of punitive practice ... that was if a player missed a bed check, or got into a fight in a bar, made too many errors in the field, or committed some major kind of indiscretion, he was sent out early in the morning to face the blimp!

  The scene was clear in my mind. Davey Johnson would say, "All right, kid, it's the blimp for you!" And whoever he was pointing his finger at would groan and call out, "No, no, not the blimp!"

  Cashen had put his fingertips together. "Mr. Temple, you're a writer, aren't you?"

  "I was one," I said quickly. "I haven't really done anything in some time."

  "I remember your stuff. Those dispatches from Vietnam. I remember an article about athletes' autographs. Some boxing articles. Another on Sadaharu Oh, the Japanese slugger. I'm an admirer. Especially the Vietnam pieces."

  I began feeling nervous. I felt a tic in my cheek developing and I put my hand up to check.

  "Now we have a problem here," Cashen was saying. "The last person in the world we wanted in the gondola yesterday morning was a journalist. It really confounded us."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "You did seem very upset. I wouldn't have gone up if I'd felt I was going to confound anyone."

  Cashen said, "It wasn't your fault. But the fact is that you were there." He leaned forward. "I'd like to make a bargain with you. It's our feeling that any good reporter would keep digging until he found out why all this was going on, wouldn't he?"

  I shrugged.

  Cashen said that he knew something of my reputation. If I wanted to, I'd be sure to track the story down and it would break in a newspaper or a magazine. That would do it: they'd lose Finch for sure.

  "Who's Finch?"

  Cashen said carefully, "Look, if I give you some idea of what was going on up there, and I lay it out for you, can I get you to hold the story?"

  I was about to explain that a bargain wasn't really necessary, that his story was safe however much I knew, when Cashen, who must have taken a slight, somewhat bewildered nod of mine as acquiescence, began to say, "In the old days we spoke about phenoms. Well, we have a pitcher coming into camp who's a kind of superphenom, to put it mildly. The scouting report on him is that he's the fastest pitcher the game has ever seen-a kind of freak."

  "How fast is he?"

  "I'm talking about a guy who can throw the ball half again as fast as it's ever been thrown!"

  I did a hasty calculation that made me shake my head in disbelief. "You talking about someone who can throw the ball at one hundred and fifty?"

  "Around there somewhere," Cashen said. "Not only that, he apparently throws with unerring control. He's learned to do this in the Himalayas somewhere. Mind over matter. We understand he's a kind of monk-a Buddhist monk. His name is Sidd Finch," he went on. "Sidd with two d's, which I understand is to honor Siddhartha, the Buddha."

  Cashen looked down at a page of notes. "He's English. An orphan. He was adopted by a famous anthropologist named Philip Sidney-Whyte Finch when he was about six. He was given the first name Hayden. The kid grew up in a rather grand house in London. His father was a widower, an expert on the mountain tribes of Nepal and Tibet. Out there somewhere he was killed in an airplane crash. At the time the kid was in his last year at the Stowe School-one of those English public schools-where he must have done very well because he was accepted into the Harvard Class of i g8o. When he got the news about his father, the kid dropped out of school and spent a couple of months in the summer of 1976 in the Himalayas looking for him. No one actually saw the crash; the plane just disappeared. That's quite something, isn't it?-this kid wandering through those mountains looking for his father. "<
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  I nodded and wondered if the mystery had ever been resolved.

  Cashen said he didn't know. "That same fall he came out of the Himalayas and entered Harvard. He dropped the `Hayden' and `Whyte' from his name, and changed Sidney, which he changed to Sidd with two d's. Maybe he didn't like hyphens. We got all this stuff from the alumni records up there at Harvard. They didn't have very much on him, frankly."

  "Did he play baseball up there?" I asked.

  "Nope," Cashen said. "He didn't stick around long enough. He's not even in the freshman directory. He dropped out after just a couple of months there. Really dropped out. He went back to Nepal, Tibet, somewhere out there, and continued his studies, or looked for his father, whatever, wandering from one monastery to another, for almost eight years. That was where he learned to throw a baseball. Don't ask me how."

  "Doesn't everybody in baseball know about this guy?" I asked.

  "Well, that's the point," Cashen said. "We'd know all about him if he'd come up through the high school system here. Or the Sally League, or the Triple-A. The first scouting report came in from Bob Schaeffer last year. He's one of our people-the manager of the Tidewater Tides, one of our Triple-A farm clubs. The Tides were playing in Old Orchard Beach in a series against the Maine Guides. Schaeffer called us from the Friendship Hotel in Old Orchard. He asked for me personally. I remember him saying that they'd just had an autumn cold snap; a lot of the leaves had turned, so the team was out there playing in this crazy football weather.

  "I knew that wasn't why he had called me-to talk about the weather in Old Orchard-so I said, `Yes, Bob, yes?'

  "So he tells me this. After the game he decided to walk back to the hotel from the ballpark, which, incidentally, is actually named The Ballpark. It's about a two-mile walk, but the Tides had played badly and Bob apparently wanted to get the game out of his system. About halfway, this kid-tall, gangly, clean-shaven, wearing blue jeans, a backpack, and a big pair of woodsman's boots, starts walking alongside. Very shy but obviously wanting to say something. Clears his throat a lot. `Ahem, ahem!' What Schaeffer thinks is perhaps the kid wants to ask for an autograph, or maybe to chat about the game. But no, this kid says, `Sir, may I be allowed to show you the art of the pitch?'-some odd phrase like that, in this kind of singsongy English accent.

  "Something about the kid's voice-maybe the politeness, the self-assurance-makes Schaeffer stop. He says, `Sure, kid, I'd like to see the art of the pitch. We coulda used it this afternoon,' referring to the fact that the Tides had just been bombed for fifteen hits.

  "So the kid points out a soda bottle on a fence post. Maybe seventy feet away. Green markings on it. An empty bottle of Sprite, Schaeffer thought it was. The kid skins off his pack, sits down on the ground, and unlaces this big hiker's boot he's wearing. He pulls it off so that one foot is bare. `For balance,' he explains to Schaeffer. Then he reaches into his knapsack and takes out a baseball. He stands up, he kicks that bare foot of his way up into the air, and he flings the ball.

  "Schaeffer tells me the bottle on the fence post out there explodes, just explodes. It disintegrates like a rifle bullet had hit it-just little specks of vaporized glass. Puff. Schaeffer told me that he could follow the flight of the ball only after it had hit the bottle. He could see it bouncing across the grass and stopping about as far as he could hit a three-wood golf shot on a good day."

  Cashen leaned back in his chair.

  "So what Schaeffer says, very calmlike, is, `Kid, would you mind showing me that again?'

  "He did too. They found a beer can, or something, and he sent that thing flying. Schaeffer told me it was the damndest thing he'd seen in all his years in baseball. He told me over the phone he was going to send in a scouting report. It was going to be a weird one because the guy had no record in organized baseball. He kept telling me to invite Finch to spring training here in St. Pete. I'll always remember what he said-'This guy can change the face of the future.' "

  Cashen shuffled through his papers. "I've got the scouting report here," he said. He told me I could have a copy for my files. He passed it over the desk.

  Cashen waited for me to inspect it. "What would you do if you got a scouting report like that?"

  "Irresistible," I said.

  "Exactly. So we invited Finch. Why not? No guarantees. No contract. Just a look-see. We sent off the invitation to a post office box in Old Orchard. I didn't think much more about it until a month ago when a letter came in-postmarked Old Orchard-from Sidd Finch."

  Cashen showed me the letter. It was written in a curious formal hand with large characters, as if a quill had done the work-a miniature of a proclamation one might find tacked on a monastery door. I remember the salutation was "My dear Sirs. . . ." The language was stilted, and very polite. Finch wrote that he was grateful for the invitation and would turn up in the training camp at St. Petersburg but he was not sure he actually wanted to join the team. He wrote apologetically that great mental adjustments had to be made in the shift from being a monk to pitching baseballs ... and that he was not sure, frankly, about certain aspects of the game that did not adhere to what he called "tantric principles."

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  "I have no idea," Cashen replied. "I suppose we'll find out."

  I went back to the letter.

  He did not want to sign any contract, or be involved in team practices, or have a locker, or talk to the press. He did not want to stay with the rest of the rookies. Any old room in a boardinghouse would do. He wanted to pitch in camera, as he put it, in some kind of enclosure where no one except a few representatives from the Mets management could watch. The reason for all this was that he did not want to raise anyone's expectations, much less those of the fans. If he decided he didn't want to play, hardly anyone would be the wiser.

  "So you agreed to all this ... ?"

  Cashen said, "At first we all thought it was absolute nonsense. The reason we didn't throw Sidd's letter in the wastepaper basket is that we kept remembering what Bob Schaeffer had told us. `This guy can change the face of the future.' So we agreed. We got him into a boardinghouse. Mrs. Butterfield ... she's over on Florida Avenue."

  "What about the other requests?" I asked.

  "Well, here at Huggins-Stengel we put up a kind of tarp-surrounded enclosure for him to pitch in so no one can see. You can spot it from the corner of the window."

  "Doesn't everyone wonder what's going on in there?"

  "The word is out that irrigation machinery is being installed. That's for the press. They don't bother checking. Not much of a story in a new irrigation system. Some of the players must know something's up. Anybody who looked in there, lifted up the corner of the tarp, you know, would find a pitcher's mound and a plate ... hardly items associated with irrigation machinery."

  "No."

  "We began getting our catchers ready-"

  "So that was what the blimp was about," I said.

  Cashen nodded. "It was Nelson's idea. He tends to be impetuous-quick decisions. To get our catchers ready for Finch, we needed a ball going that fast. We couldn't get the pitching machines cranked up to anywhere near that speed. So the idea was to throw a ball out of something way up in the sky and let gravity help us out. A blimp! Eureka! Why not? So we get a blimp. That's the way corporate America works!"

  "How fast does a ball go dropped out of a blimp?" I asked.

  "We got someone to work on it," Cashen explained. "It depends on the height. They told us that from five hundred feet or so that a baseball will get up to about a hundred and thirty miles per hour by the time it reaches the ground. From a thousand feet a ball comes down at one hundred and seventy, just about what Finch throws ... close enough to give the catchers some idea."

  "So you're prepared."

  Cashen leaned forward again. "Finch is here in camp. He came in yesterday afternoon. We took him to Mrs. Butterfield's boardinghouse. Today we brought him out here to Huggins. We went out to the enclosure to watch. It's all absolutely tr
ue."

  A WEEK went by. I heard nothing from the Mets. The phone in the bungalow rang on occasion. I picked it up more often than usual-my curiosity naturally piqued by the goings-on in the blimp and how Sidd Finch was doing at Huggins.On the other end were not the Mets, but a friend or two, including my sister. She was so startled to hear my voice actually answering the phone that she temporarily forgot what it was she was calling about.

  I thought about my morning in the blimp and about the conversation the next day in the Mets office with Frank Cashen. What was odd about the meeting was that he felt he had to strike a bargain with me. If he had taken the time to check it out, he would have discovered that I was not capable of writing a paragraph, much less a line of copy. I was a completely defused member of the communications industry.

  Still, I was pleased Cashen knew my work. At one time I had indeed been making a comfortable living as a freelance writer. The editors at Esquire, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Life, and so on, knew my name, and when I called I could get through to them. Often an editor would call me-"I have an idea I'd like to talk to you about." He would add, "Let's have lunch," and we would go to The Four Seasons, where half a dozen editors I knew from other publications would be leaning across the wineglasses to plot with their writers of the moment, most of whom I also knew. At the end of lunch I would usually say, "Well, let me think about it for a day or so." Sometimes it took two lunches. At the end of the ritual I would usually agree to do what had been suggested.

  My "pieces"-as everyone called such things-tended to be long, imbued with a flair that was mostly a kind of irreverent whimsy. Editors took this to be thoughtful analysis. More important to them, I got the pieces in on time. The variety was far-ranging. I wrote portraits of politicians, labor leaders, athletes, publishers. I used a foldback notebook and wrote a self-developed shorthand in it. I wrote travel articles. I prided myself on finding pegs on which to hang the subject. I wrote pieces about bubblegum cards and autographs.