'BAMMA SLAMMA: The Tale of Harvard's Incredible Sid Finch

On a hot Sunday afternoon, Princeton shortstop Spencer Lucian freezes. A baseball buzzes by.

“Strike three!” bellows the umpire.

It’s all gun smoke and bravado from Shawn Haviland, Harvard’s young freshman hurler, who owns a 4-1 record in five collegiate starts.

Three up and three down. Off the mound ambles the umpteenth example of coach Joe Walsh’s recruiting proficiency.

Imagine, now, if Walsh had bagged Sidd Finch ’79.

You may not know about Sidd Finch. Truth is, the man attended Harvard for only one semester—in the fall of 1975.

Attached to his body is the greatest arm ever to have thrown a baseball.

Twenty years ago this month, the late, great George Plimpton ’48 broke the story in Sports Illustrated of an extraordinary young New York Mets farmhand who “may well change the course of baseball history.”

Finch surely would have been the first orphan from Leicester, England to play in the Major Leagues. He likely would have, though I’m not sure, been the first disciple of the Tibetan 11th-century poet-saint Lama Milaraspa to make the New York Mets.

Neither of those facts, not even his virtuosity on the French horn, made Finch particularly special to then-Mets pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, or even to Harvard head coach Loyal K. Park, who led the Crimson to a .727 winning percentage and five Ivy League titles from 1969-78.

With a bizarre stiff-armed cricket bowler’s heave—and “utilizing the Tantric principle of body and mind,” as Plimpton reported—Finch became the first man to record a plus-103 mph fastball. He did it on St. Patrick’s Day, 1985 at Mets’ camp outside of Tampa.

The speed? 168.

Stottlemyer called it, according to Plimpton, “the most awesome thing that has ever happened in baseball.”

An amazed Peter Ueberroth, MLB’s commissioner back then, announced, “I’ll have to see it to believe it!”

Unfortunately, the Mets called a press conference a week later to announce that Finch intended to quit baseball for good and concentrate on the French horn. In addition, the control on his fastball had vanished, leaving his out-pitch “an instrument of Chaos and Cruelty,” Finch said.

He was never seen again.

The icing on that mind-boggling story? Few remember that Finch actually showed up at Harvard in 1975 before departing for Tibet.

“The registrar’s office at Harvard,” Plimpton reported, “will release no information about Finch except that in the Spring of 1976 he withdrew from the college in midterm.”

And so Plimpton requested the personal reminiscences of Finch’s freshman-year roommate, Henry W. Peterson ’79, who in 1985 worked as a New York stockbroker.

Peterson told Plimpton that Finch had kept few belongings in 1975, other than the “yak fur” rug that covered his bed. It was rarely disturbed.

“My assumption was that [Sidd] had a girl in Somerville or something,” Peterson remembered, “and stayed out there.”

Shame is, Finch’s decision to cut school so he could study in Tibet clearly deprived the Crimson of an ace.

I asked a handful of current Harvard players by email to talk about their unusual Crimson predecessor. Most of them, then, gloomily wondered what might have been.

“It’s a shame he didn’t stay to play through his college career here,” sophomore Drew Casey, Harvard’s current backup catcher, told me. “He would have been the most feared pitcher in college baseball, but I understand that he had some stuff he needed to get straight.”

Though many expressed regret about the affair, others on the Crimson remained happy that Finch hadn’t come along, say, 20 years later.

“I would not agree to catch a 168 mph pitch,” captain catcher Schuyler Mann wrote, adding that it would be “suicidal” to do so.

“I would only agree,” he added, “if offered money and fame.”

Haviland, on the other hand, correctly mused that throwing such a prodigious heater would bring him money and fame.

“If I threw 168 mph, I would be answering this question from my Bentley on the

way to Yankee Stadium instead of a dorm room,” he responded.

Casey worried that the story of Sidd Finch might convince teammate Matt Brunnig, an oddity in that he can pitch with both arms, “to follow in this guy’s footsteps and go on a spiritual journey in hopes of one day being able to throw harder.”

In the end, the 20-year anniversary of Finch’s tryout remains a sober reminder of unfulfilled promise. In the meantime, new Harvard legends abound.

“Well, Alex, I used to be able to throw a pigskin over a quarter mile,” junior right fielder Lance Salsgiver told me. “Heck, I could throw it from the quad all the way to Dillon Field House.”

Regrettably, without the legendary George Plimpton to report it, the story just isn’t, and never will be, the same.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.