In early 1985,
Mark Mulvoy, the
managing editor of
Sports Illustrated, noticed that a
cover date that year would fall on April 1. He asked
George Plimpton to commemorate this with an article on
April Fools' Day jokes in sports. When Plimpton found himself unable to find enough examples to craft an article, Mulvoy gave Plimpton permission to create his own hoax. "Sidd" Finch was a rookie
baseball pitcher in training with the
New York Mets after being discovered in
Old Orchard Beach, Maine. He also wore only one shoe—a heavy hiker's boot—when pitching. Finch, who had never played baseball before, was attempting to decide between a sports career and one playing the
French horn. What was astonishing about Finch was that he could pitch a
fastball at an amazing , far above the record of a "mere" , with pinpoint accuracy, and without needing to warm up. Finch decided not to pursue a baseball career, instead choosing to "play the
French horn or
golf or something." Novelist
Jonathan Dee, who was working as Plimpton's assistant at the time, described Plimpton at the time of the writing of the article as "a wreck". Dee wrote years later, "Nothing, he knew, falls quite so flat as a bad joke. Such was his anxiety that, for the one and only time in my five years in his employ, he asked me to come in to work on a Saturday. I still remember my naïve astonishment at the sight of a world-famous, successful writer actually agonizing over whether something he’d written was good enough, funny enough, believable enough, or whether the whole thing would wind up making him seem like a national jackass." Dee also talked about his role in the Finch hoax in an outtake from the 2012 documentary film
Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself. ==Response==