Was the Greatest April Fools' Joke in Sports History Borrowed from a Poem?

This is true: on April 1, 1985, Sports Illustrated published an article by Paris Review editor George Plimpton called "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch." It was an account of a Buddhist pitcher with a 168 mph fastball and his spring training tryout with the New York Mets. The story was not true, but the April Fool's joke was an instant sensation and remains one of Plimpton's best-known works. SI reprinted the piece on its website last October as one of 60 of the best stories ever to appear in the magazine. It is widely regarded as a great piece of sportswriting.

What is less well-known is that it borrows, without acknowledgment, much of its premise from Ko, or a Season On Earth, a long avant-garde poem by Kenneth Koch, a poet Plimpton published in The Paris Review and a classmate of Plimpton's at Harvard.

Over the decade before Finch's imaginary arrival in camp, Mets fans had endured some of the saddest baseball in history. But there were reasons for hope: Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Davey Johnson and Dwight Gooden created a sort of tonal shift in Queens. The improvement was not just ambient, either. The Mets finished last in the NL East in 1983; in 1984 they came in second. A trade the winter before the 1985 season for Gary Carter abruptly made the Mets favorites for the division. And then there was Finch.

As Plimpton had it, Finch refused to snap his arm in his delivery, saying, "I undertake as a rule of training to refrain from injury to living things." With the prospect of this gentle messiah joining a rotation that already had Gooden, Darling and Fernandez, it was easy to forgive Met fans for dreaming not just of the pennant, but a dynasty. In an era before fans knew the name and outlook for their team's fifty best minor league players, the prospect of a prospect like Finch materializing was almost, almost plausible.

There were several signs that Sidd Finch might be too good to be true. First, the news had not broken at all during the exhibition season, which was over, and Finch had not appeared on the roster. Second, the article was written by a person whose sports writing experience amounted to first-person accounts of his own attempts at playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions, boxing Archie Moore, and pitching in the 1959 All-Star Game. Third, Plimpton's version of Lenny Dykstra speaks like he went to Harvard, which in retrospect was probably the biggest giveaway of all. And finally, half the story's headline was borrowed from an F. Scott Fitzgerald fable—not a complete tell, but a pretty big hint, and a decidedly Plimptonian one. But Met fans live by the slogan, "Ya gotta believe," and they believed.

Plimpton built anticipation for six paragraphs before letting his phenom make a Met whimper:

"I'm standing in there to give this guy a target, just waving the bat once or twice out over the plate. He starts his windup. He sways way back, like Juan Marichal, this hiking boot comes clomping over—I thought maybe he was wearing it for balance or something—and he suddenly rears upright like a catapult. The ball is launched from an arm completely straight up and stiff. Before you can blink, the ball is in the catcher's mitt. You hear it crack, and then there's this little bleat from Reynolds."

Poetry is a marginal activity in American culture, restricted mainly to university professors and aspiring graduate students, but it wasn't always so. Newspapers once regularly printed poems by amateurs; newsweeklies had poetry critics on staff. When Kenneth Koch's first book, Ko, or a Season on Earth was published by Grove in 1960—two years before league expansion brought the Mets into existence—Time praised it while lamenting that poetry was, yes, an increasingly a marginal activity in American culture. (A note of disclosure: I am an advisor to the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate.)

As the unsigned review explains, "The main themes of Ko are, as its dust jacket states, 'baseball, neurosis, art and death; travel, weather, self-realization and power; love, error, prophesy, destruction and pleasure.' Among the characters who reel through the commotion of Koch's jouncing, rhymed octaves (following the rhythm of Byron's Don Juan) are Ko, a young Japanese pitcher who earns a tryout with the Dodgers and throws with such force that he shatters grandstands…"

Koch builds anticipation for six pages before letting his phenom wreak havoc on the Dodgers' spring training camp:

Ko counted ten,
Wound up, and threw the baseball with such steam
That it went through the backstop, lost till when
The field would be torn down, and lazy goats
Would ramble through it gnawing shreds of coats;
It dug into the grandstand, where it stayed.
The crowd went wild—the crowd was mostly team,
Plus several wives. The catcher, with his splayed
Brown weighty glove, first spellbound, with a scream
Fell in the dirt behind the plate and prayed;
And Slater's agitation was extreme.
"Put someone else behind the plate," he cried,
"So that this talent may be verified!"
Another catcher came. Ko raised his torso
In a high arc, then slumped it down again,
Then raised his arm and threw with such a force (Oh
It was beautiful to see) that when
The players' screams died down, they saw that, more so
Than the first, this second ball had pen-
Etrated through the enormous blocks of wood
And made the grandstand shiver where it stood.

There are only so many ways to talk about a pitcher's delivery, and stories about out-of-nowhere rookies are archetypal. But the specific gifts of Finch and Ko are similar—both throw menacing fastballs, both wrestle with spiritual difficulties around pursuing their gifts, both called into creation by members of the Harvard Class of 1948—that at the very least one has to ask whether the tie should go to the runner.