The Greatest Hoax in Baseball History: How a Fake Pitcher Fooled America
In 1985, Sports Illustrated convinced America that a mysterious Mets prospect could throw 168 mph. The Sidd Finch story became the most famous hoax in baseball history.
In late March 1985, subscribers to Sports Illustrated opened their magazines to find a 13-page profile of a New York Mets pitching prospect nobody had ever heard of. His name was Hayden Siddhartha "Sidd" Finch. He was 28 years old. He had never played organized baseball. And according to the article, he could throw a fastball 168 miles per hour.
For reference, no pitcher in history had ever been clocked above 103 mph.
The story, written by George Plimpton, was titled "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch." It would become the most famous April Fools' Day prank in the history of sports, a piece of fiction so convincing that it fooled general managers, newspaper editors, television networks, and thousands of ordinary fans who wanted desperately to believe.
The Setup
The whole thing started with a calendar. Mark Mulvoy, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, noticed that one of the magazine's 1985 cover dates would land on April 1. He called Plimpton, the legendary participatory journalist who had quarterbacked for the Detroit Lions, pitched against major league hitters, and played goalie for the Boston Bruins, all in the name of writing about sports from the inside. Mulvoy asked him to put together a piece about great April Fools' jokes in sports history.
Plimpton tried. He couldn't find enough material. Most of the pranks he dug up were, as he later described them, the "you had to be there" variety. So Mulvoy made a different suggestion. Why not invent one?
Plimpton ran with it. He invented a character with the kind of biography that could only exist in fiction, though he wrote every word of it as fact. Sidd Finch, according to the article, had grown up in an English orphanage after his father, an archaeologist, died in a plane crash in Nepal. He briefly attended Harvard. Then he dropped out and traveled to Tibet, where he studied under a Buddhist monk and learned what Plimpton called "yogic mastery of mind-body." Somewhere in the mountains, throwing rocks and meditating, Finch discovered he could hurl objects at speeds that defied physics.
He showed up at the Mets' spring training complex in St. Petersburg, Florida, wearing a heavy hiking boot on one foot and nothing on the other. He carried a French horn, a prayer rug, a food bowl, and a knapsack. His only request was that he be allowed to pitch in private.
Why People Believed It
The article should have been obviously fake. A man who had never played baseball, throwing faster than anyone in history by a margin that defied belief, wearing one boot, debating whether to pursue the sport or play French horn. But Plimpton was a master storyteller, and Sports Illustrated was the most trusted name in sports journalism. The piece was not written as satire. It read like a straight feature.
What made the hoax stick was the level of detail. Plimpton named specific Mets coaches and players throughout the article. He quoted pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre discussing Finch's mechanics, noting that his delivery resembled a cricket bowler's and that the wrist snap off his stiff arm was "incredible." He described how the Mets used a JUGS Supergun II radar gun to clock Finch's fastball on St. Patrick's Day and the reading came back at 168 mph. The top of the gauge read 200. For context, Plimpton noted that the highest the JUGS had ever registered for a baseball was 103 mph, when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan hit that mark on the same day at the 1978 All-Star Game. The fastest projectile the gun had ever measured in any sport was Roscoe Tanner's tennis serve at 153. Finch had blown past all of it.
Plimpton also described how three young Mets prospects, outfielder John Christensen, third baseman Dave Cochrane, and center fielder Lenny Dykstra, were brought in to face Finch in a secret session. He wrote it as though the front office was struggling to contain the secret, as though the truth was leaking out against the organization's will.
Then there were the photographs. SI photographer Lane Stewart had traveled to the Mets' camp and shot real images alongside real Mets players. But the man in the photographs was not a pitcher. He was Joe Berton, a 31-year-old junior high school art teacher from Oak Park, Illinois.
The Man Behind the Mask
Lane Stewart and Berton were old friends. Stewart had used Berton as an assistant on previous photo assignments, and when he read Plimpton's description of Finch, tall, gawky, slightly odd, he immediately thought of Berton. He called him up and, playing it straight at first, told him about this incredible Mets prospect hidden away at spring training. Berton, a diehard Cubs fan, panicked. "What about our season!" he said. "What's this guy going to do?"
Then Stewart told him the truth. "You're going to be him."
Berton needed a French horn. He borrowed one from Ed Von Holst, a music teacher at the same school, Percy Julian Junior High. Von Holst gave him a quick lesson on how to hold it so it would look right in photographs. Berton also tracked down a Tibetan rug. He flew to Florida.
The Mets were in on it. Owner Nelson Doubleday Jr. had a relationship with Plimpton and gave the operation his blessing. The team's PR director, Jay Horwitz, escorted Berton through the facility. A clubhouse attendant offered Berton a uniform with the number 45, but Berton noticed someone else already had that number. He asked for 21 instead, Roberto Clemente's number. If it was good enough for Clemente, he figured, it was good enough for a fictional monk.
For several days, Berton wandered through Mets camp as Sidd Finch, hauling his French horn and rug from one photo setup to the next. Stewart shot him sitting cross-legged in the outfield, playing the horn near the batting cages, and standing on the mound in his one boot. The real players were not entirely sure what to make of him. Some thought he might be a friend of ownership. During one spring training game, Berton was sitting along the right field line with Dwight Gooden, Jesse Orosco, and Kevin Mitchell. Mitchell grabbed the French horn, started trying to play it during the game, and Berton had to wrestle it back. "I can get kicked out of here," he told Mitchell. "I don't care what you guys are doing, but I can't lose this."
One of the photographs showed Berton with a young Lenny Dykstra, who appeared to be watching in amazement. Another showed him speaking with Stottlemyre. In nearly every shot, Berton's face was turned away from the camera, preserving the mystery.
The Fallout
The magazine hit newsstands a few days before the April 1 cover date, which meant readers encountered the story without any April Fools' context in their minds. The reaction was immediate and enormous.
Mets fans flooded Sports Illustrated with phone calls and letters demanding more information. A New York sports page editor called the Mets' public relations office and complained that SI had scooped them on a major story. Two major league general managers phoned Commissioner Peter Ueberroth asking about Finch's status. The St. Petersburg Times dispatched a reporter to find the mysterious pitcher. A radio talk show host went on the air claiming he had personally seen Finch pitch.
NBC, CBS, ABC, and local Florida newspapers all sent reporters to Al Lang Stadium, where the Mets trained, looking for a press conference. The Mets had given Finch a locker between George Foster and Darryl Strawberry. The fiction and reality were becoming tangled.
Back in Oak Park, Berton's students at Percy Julian Junior High started asking questions. One of them approached him and said, "Does this mean you're not going to be a teacher anymore?" The Today Show and the New York Times called the school looking for him. Local reporters showed up with radar guns. They took him to the school gym, had him throw to the P.E. teacher, and clocked him at 68 mph. "You just need a new radar gun," Berton told them. "The one on that machine is broken."
The Hidden Clue Nobody Noticed
Plimpton had buried a confession in plain sight. The article's subheading read: "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."
Take the first letter of every word, and it spells out: HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY AH FIB.
Almost nobody caught it.
The Unraveling
On April 1, the Mets invited Berton back to spring training for what they billed as a press conference. He came out barefoot, carrying a walking stick, and read a retirement speech that Plimpton had written for him in the style of Lou Gehrig. Finch, he announced, had decided to give up baseball for "the greater challenge of golf." Reporters interviewed him afterward, and he stayed in character, telling them he and Stewart had first met while camel racing in Saudi Arabia.
The St. Petersburg Times, which had been beaten by its own credulity, printed "The Sidd Finch Decision" t-shirts and handed them out to fans. Kids along the first baseline begged Berton for autographs. He signed them as Sidd Finch.
In its April 8 issue, SI ran a brief follow-up announcing Finch's retirement from baseball. On April 15, the magazine's publisher, Robert L. Miller, finally confirmed the hoax outright.
The Afterlife of Sidd Finch
Plimpton expanded the article into a novel in 1987, also called The Curious Case of Sidd Finch. In the book, Finch actually reaches the majors and pitches perfect games. The novel got decent reviews but never quite matched the electricity of the original article. Plimpton died in September 2003.
For Berton, the character never fully went away. He met his future wife, Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, later in 1985, and she had no idea about his second identity until they were walking down Michigan Avenue during the holidays and someone leaned out of a car window and yelled "Hey, Sidd!" Years later, standing in line at a pub in Oxford, England, an American stranger recognized him.
The Mets left tickets for Berton at Wrigley Field whenever they came to play the Cubs in 1985 and 1986, a thank-you for all the positive publicity. The Mets won the World Series in 1986. Berton, the Cubs fan, was not amused.
In 2015, for the 30th anniversary, the Brooklyn Cyclones held a Sidd Finch bobblehead night. Plimpton had died twelve years earlier, so his son Taylor threw the first pitch. Berton came and signed autographs on the bobbleheads, which showed Finch in a Cyclones uniform with a French horn and one bare foot. ESPN's 30 for 30 Shorts released a mini-documentary about the hoax the same year.
In April 2025, for the 40th anniversary, the Mets invited Berton back to Citi Field for another press conference and jersey ceremony. He got the full treatment.
Why It Still Works
The Sidd Finch hoax landed at a particular moment. It was 1985. There was no internet, no Twitter, no way to fact-check a story in real time. Sports Illustrated was gospel. If SI published a 13-page feature with photographs, scouting reports, and quotes from real coaches, then the story was real until someone proved otherwise. And proving otherwise took weeks.
But the hoax also worked because Plimpton understood something about baseball fans. The sport has always been a magnet for myth-making. Every generation produces stories that blur the line between what happened and what people wish had happened. Babe Ruth calling his shot. The Curse of the Bambino. A 19-year-old kid from Tampa named Dwight Gooden who threw so hard they called him Dr. K and who, in that very same 1985 season, would go 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA and win the Cy Young Award at age 20. If Gooden was real, if a 20-year-old could do that, then maybe a Buddhist monk throwing 168 mph wasn't so far-fetched after all.
The Mets' 1985 roster was full of characters. Darryl Strawberry. Keith Hernandez. Gary Carter. Lenny Dykstra, who would later become famous for reasons that had nothing to do with baseball. This was a team that felt larger than life to begin with. Adding a fictional mystic to the mix was only a small stretch of an already wild reality.
Jonathan Dee, the novelist who was working as Plimpton's assistant at the Paris Review during the writing of the article, later described the scene in Plimpton's office in the days before publication. Plimpton was "a wreck," Dee wrote. He agonized over every sentence, terrified that the joke would fall flat, that the whole thing would make him look foolish. For the first and only time in five years, he asked Dee to come in on a Saturday.
What Plimpton feared most was the silence of a bad joke. What he got instead was the roar of a country completely taken in. Forty years later, Sidd Finch remains the most famous player who never existed, and Joe Berton, the art teacher from Oak Park who could barely throw 68 mph, remains the most unlikely baseball legend of them all.