"The fact is, they know very little about him. He has had no baseball career." (Image by "Sports Illustrated.")

As April Fools’ Day and baseball season approach, it’s time to look back at one of the greatest pranks ever pulled, a George Plimpton article in Sports Illustrated entitled “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” which was published on April 1, 1985. The piece, about a newly discovered, larger-than-life baseball player who could supposedly throw a fastball 168 miles per hour, was presented as fact by the mag and fooled people across the nation for several days. Outside of War of the Worlds, it may be the best large-scale hoax in American history.

And it’s unlikely to be surpassed. You see some person or another tricked occasionally on April Fools’ Day now, but a mass prank that permeates through the culture over the course of a week is only really possible in a world where communication is limited, information imperfect and a sense of wonder prevalent. The information explosion has passed April Fools’ Day into obsolescence. In our time, it’s much easier to be shocked by truths than tricks. An excerpt from the article:

“The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottlemyre and a few members of the Mets’ front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick’s Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch’s fastball. The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighs about five pounds and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher. A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch’s velocity — accurate, so the manufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of the gauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is named after the oldtimer’s descriptive — the ‘jug-handled’curveball) was a Roscoe Tanner serve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned for a baseball was 103 mph, which it did, curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the 1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at that speed. On March 17, the gun was handled by Stottlemyre. He heard the pop of the ball in Reynolds’s mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. Then the astonishing figure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottlemyre remembers whistling in amazement, and then he heard Reynolds say, ‘Don’t tell me, Mel, I don’t want to know. . . ‘

The Met front office is reluctant to talk about Finch. The fact is, they know very little about him. He has had no baseball career. Most of his life has been spent abroad, except for a short period at Harvard University.”