Forty years ago this week, Sports Illustrated published a story about a New York Mets prospect that was too good to be true.
Literally.
Standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 170 pounds, a right-handed pitcher named Hayden "Siddhartha" Finch became one of the tallest tales in sports history.
Raised as an orphan in England, Finch studied a year at Harvard, before dropping out and heading to Tibet, where he hoped to be a monk. Despite being 28 years old, Finch was discovered in Maine by the Mets' Triple-A manager.
What did he discover? Finch's 168-mph fastball, of course.
Within 24 hours of the story's publication, many fans were whipped into a frenzy. Although some knew right away it was an April Fool's joke, the magazine arrived in mailboxes and on newsstands before its April 1 publishing date.
The Mets' switchboard lit up with calls, and confused reporters headed to St. Petersburg, Fla., to get a glimpse of this unknown phenom.
Every piece of the story, written by George Plimpton of "Paper Lion" fame, was carefully orchestrated.
"Frank Cashen, our late GM, had a relationship with (SI managing editor) Mark Mulvoy," said Jay Horwitz, the Mets longtime public-relations man. "Frank calls me into his office and says, 'How's your sense of humor these days?'"
Cashen told Horwitz that Plimpton came up with an April Fool's joke that would involve a fake Mets pitcher and asked Horwitz to help coordinate it.
For the Mets, the prank was an easy sell.
In 1985, the Mets were the best team in New York — with Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry as young stars — but they still played second fiddle to the Yankees, who had last won it all in 1977 and 1978.
The real Sidd Finch was actually a junior high school art teacher from Oak Park, Ill., named Joe Berton, who was a friend of Sports Illustrated photographer Lane Stewart.
"Lane calls me up and says, I got a baseball story involving the New York Mets," Berton told cllct. "He goes, Yeah, it's about this guy whose got a great fastball, 160-some mile an hour fastball. All he's got is it a French horn and a food bowl and a rug.
"And I'm thinking, 'This is too crazy. But I like, well, it is the Mets, yeah?' ... He goes, 'Well, get yourself a French horn and a pair of work boots and a food bowl. You've got to be the guy come to St Petersburg."
Berton talked to the school's music teacher and convinced him to borrow a French horn. He also borrowed a size-14 pair of work boots and bought a wooden bowl and what could count as a Tibetan rug.
The idea was it was originally going to be a column, but the pictures turned out so good it became a huge, 14-page feature.
Not wanting to ruin the joke, very few players were let in on it.
Despite all the clues — at Harvard, Finch slept on a carpet of woven yak fur and was a french horn virtuoso — the fact Sports Illustrated never admitted in print the whole story was an April Fool's joke upset some readers.
"If the issue had been dated March 31 or April 2, we never would have used the story," Mulvoy said at the time.
But Mulvoy said both he and Plimpton were looking for some clean fun.
"I publish 550 stories a year," Mulvoy said. "So much of what we do has to do with things like drugs, salaries and now, point shaving, things we have to do. But, for once, I wanted to have fun. We've never done anything like this and probably never will again."
Berton also saw the prank as pure entertainment.
"Plimpton told me later, the extreme nervousness on his part (was) if anyone was really going to fall for the joke," Berton said. "I think when you remember that it's a joke, I mean, no one was harmed in this. We weren't trying to gain any money from it, unlike a hoax, which can be, you know, deceitful."
Horwitz invited Berton down to St. Petersburg to continue the act and issued a press release. The St. Petersburg Times printed T-shirts with a French horn that read "The Sidd Finch Decision."
"We built this large canopy, and we had Sidd throw, but we didn't let the writers see him throw," Horwitz said. "So we burnt the hole in Ronn Reynolds catcher's mitt. We came out of the canopy and he said, "Guys, this was his 118 mile per hour curveball."
On April 1, after several days of suspense — Sen. Daniel Moynihan and MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth were two of the people who called up SI to verify the story around Finch — it was time for the gig to be up.
The Mets held a retirement press conference in which Berton read a few lines prepared for him by Plimpton. He was retiring from baseball to play the more peaceful game of golf.
For those saying Plimpton and Mulvoy never gave the readers any clue, they actually did, but it wasn't easy to decipher. The story's beginning had a hidden code in it.
"He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulant lifestyle, Sidd's deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball."
The first letter of every word in that first part of the sentence spells out H-A-P-P-Y-A-P-R-I-L-F-O-O-L-S-D-A-Y.
Said Horwitz of the clue, "Sherlock Holmes couldn't have found it there."
Berton was never featured on a Finch trading card in any licensed regular set, but he has been asked to sign many custom cards, some of which have sold on eBay.
Last year, Panini put Berton, pictured as his current self in a Mets uniform, in its 2024 Panini Prospect Edition. He signs cards as "Sidd Finch."
While some might think Berton would be defined by Finch, he actually has had an impressive career as a miniature artist.
One day, his wife, who met him later in 1985, was walking with him down Chicago's Michigan Avenue and a carload of kids drive by.
"They start yelling, 'Hey Sidd. Hey Sidd,' and pointing," Berton recalled. "And my wife says, 'What was that all about?' And I said, 'Well, let me tell you an interesting story ..."
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.