Sid Finch

I value trust and honesty as core beliefs. I have always been transparent in work and in my personal life because I have nothing to hide. I do not lie, cheat, or steal — so why wouldn't I be?

With that context, this post is not an April Fool. But I do want to share the best April Fool that ever got me. It got thousands — if not millions — of us. Every year I think about it, remember my friend Erik and his dad, and I smile.

1985

The year was 1985. Erik and I were baseball-crazy teenagers getting ready for our first freshman high school baseball season. I was finishing dinner with my parents when the white rotary phone in my mom's kitchen rang.

"It's over! It's over! Baseball as we know it is over."

Erik was on the other end, more excited than I had ever heard him. He went on and on about a new pitcher the Mets had found who threw 168 miles per hour with pinpoint accuracy. The Mets would win the World Series — nobody could beat a team with pitching like that. I told him I would be right over.

I finished dinner in a hurry, ran out the back door, through our backyard, down the hill, across our back neighbor's yard, and up the block three houses to what felt like my second home. Erik and I poured through the article in his newly arrived Sports Illustrated.

The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball.

In 1985, phones were mounted on kitchen walls with long spiral cords that gave you just enough range to pace the kitchen. Mobile phones did not exist. The internet had technically been invented, but with a few exceptions for lab-bound academics, nobody had heard of it. Computers existed but were standalone machines with no connection to anything.

For two teenage boys crazy about sports, that meant everything we knew came from newspapers and magazines. Sports Illustrated was the bible. We hung on every word and every photo. We believed Sidd Finch was real and that he was about to take the Mets to the World Series. There could be no doubt.

The reveal

The next evening I ran back over to Erik's after dinner for some wiffle ball in his backyard. The mood was calmer — and a little melancholy — compared to the night before. Erik's dad had figured it out.

"Write down the first letter of every word in the caption," he told us.

This is what we saw:

He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball.

Happy April Fools Day

Erik and I felt like the biggest fools of all!

Note: George Plimpton's Sidd Finch remains one of the greatest April Fool's jokes ever pulled. Forty years later it still makes me smile — and still makes me think about Erik, his dad, and that kitchen wall phone.

Read the original Sports Illustrated article: The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

For more background, see Sidd Finch on Wikipedia.