Baseball's Greatest Player Never Actually Played Baseball

for as long as they've been around the New York Mets seemed to always be defined by great pitching it's like at least once per decade the Mets have a siyoung caliber pitcher anchoring their staff most of which are homegrown stars which is huge for their starting pitching development but there was once a Mets pitching prospect completely unlike the rest his name Sid Finch yes he really is wearing one boot in this picture he somehow had fun pitching this way timeout here if you know anything at all about the story of sidd Finch don't immediately rush to the comments with it the story of sidd Finch is gonna be told in this video and if you know the main thing about the story please don't spoil it for others if you don't know what I'm talking about completely ignore what I just said and take this all in we got to go back to 1985 for this one which is why we waited a little bit to cover it for a video now that it's 20/20 and we're a nice 35 years out of 1985 it's a fitting time to revisit this in the early 80s the Mets weren't very good but there was a lot of promise entering 1985 they had Dwight Gooden who at the age of a traditional college freshman put up arguably the greatest rookie pitching season ever Darryl Strawberry and Keith Hernandez led the lineup which just added a future Hall of Fame catcher and Gary Carter in spring training that year a young pitching prospect named Sid finch first onto the scene pretty much out of nowhere this was before mass prospect analysis and social media so maybe he slipped through the cracks of the baseball world because listen to this guy's origin story born Haydn Sid Hart - Finch he was born in England before briefly attending Harvard University his adoptive father was an archaeologist who died in a plane crash in Nepal sometime between then and when the Mets found him he went to a Tibetan monastery and found a new mentor in the great poet Saint Lama Milla RoSPA hopefully I didn't just completely butcher the pronunciation there and then he trained and played the French horn - he loved the French horn eventually as put it he learned the art of the pitch how'd the Mets find him the story apparently goes like this one day the Mets triple-a manager was walking to a hotel where sidd Finch approached him or the manager saw him or something like that Sid went on to throw a baseball at a soda bottle that was sitting on a fence near the hotel and the bottle exploded the manager was floored obviously you can't really blame the rest of the league for not finding Sid because imagine instructing your scouts to find people hanging out by hotels who just happen to have a rocket for an arm wild unexpected events happen all the time in daily life movies video games this was just a big surprise for baseball by 1985 he was at Mets spring training look here he is with Mets pitching coach Mel stottlemyre and outfielder Lenny Dykstra if Sid had gone under the radar due to his unconventional origins all that changed in the spring standing six foot four and at 28 years of age a prime year for a lot of major league players he could throw hard want to know how hard here's a graph this is Carlos via nuevas 57 mile-per-hour pitch this is a 100 mile-per-hour fastball this is Aroldis Chapman's 106 mile-per-hour pitch the hardest in-game pitch in MLB radar gun has ever recorded and this is where Sid Finch was said to be a hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour easy thing to think there is a radar gun malfunction for example I once went to a spring training game as a kid where to my memory the stadium radar gun showed a guy throwing about a hundred and eighty miles an hour I looked the picture up on the internet recently and he's now a car salesman nothing wrong with that but what car salesman can throw a baseball that hard what do I think happened Sid consistently hit triple digits enough to where someone stunned by how hard he was throwing already just ran with it and it was documented radar gun miss reads happen this one was just probably taken down like the others in the heat of the moment with the guy who held the gun probably in a real state of shock anyway then came the Sports Illustrated article Syd generated enough buzz to finally warrant his story coming out Mets fans rejoiced the rest of the league was terrified people could maybe get hit soft white good and every once in a while around that time even based on the small amount of what was already known about sidd Finch there seemed to be no chance of hitting him the floodgates had opened everyone knew about sidd Finch you would think it was only a matter of time before he stepped on the mound at Shea Stadium to carry the Mets to a World Series there was just one thing he didn't exist we have been hoodwinked bamboozled led astray run amok and flat-out deceive oh yeah I forgot to mention the Sports Illustrated article came out on April 1st the Mets were in on it and they duped the world a week later they basically said that Sid quit baseball and then the week after that admitted the whole thing was a hoax Sid Finch was played by an actor and the goal was to make an April Fool's Day edition of Sports Illustrated and it worked considering gta5 convinced everyone that it can be a winter wonderland in California it's not too crazy to understand how Sports Illustrated and the Mets pulled this off one more thing the first letter of every word in the subheading of the April first article spells out happy April Fool's Day if you don't believe it you can pause and make sure the Mets went on to post their best year in over a decade in 1985 and win the World Series the next year imagine if they had Sid Finch on that team too some of you watching are probably kicking yourselves for not realizing this was all a prank some of you probably snuffed this out and to that good job either way there's not really a lesson to draw from this except maybe don't believe everything you hear honestly what else is there to say that other than just don't get duped hey we did it again if you made it this far first off thanks for watching if you're new and enjoyed the video please consider subscribing for more sports content if you're a returning subscriber and love what you see from us we have a membership program for anyone interested in extra perks such as sneak peeks and an end screen shout out everything you need to know is on screen right now alright that's all for this video take it easy guys [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Stark Raving Sports

Views: 1,939,417

Rating: 4.4781284 out of 5

Keywords: Stark Raving Sports, Baseball, Sports, Mets, New York Mets, MLB, Sidd Finch, Mets Pitching, 1986 Mets, 86 Mets, Mets World Series, Best Baseball Stories, Best Pitchers Baseball

Id: 5FShbkDV4Q4

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/palegreycells]

Haven't watched the video, but wtf is going on with that guy's foot? It's like a size 27

[u/VisibleDucks]

Sidd really was the greatest to ever step on the mound. It was a shame what happened but I truly believe he was watching over the team when they won in 86

[u/Doc_Benz]

Greg “toe” Nash is a better story like this, a sad story but a true one

[u/Immediatewhaffle]

Where can I find the original April fools article that this is based on? I remember My dad made me read it as a kid and it completely went over my head that it was April fools and I was so psyched about this guy.

My dad may never let me live that down.

[u/jmanqwerty]

Faced in him high school. Overrated if you ask me.

[u/Rudeyyyy]

“Don’t believe everything you hear”

Where’s Correa I’m sure he’d love this guy

[u/Theeclat]

This was fun.

[u/Bradcam3]

The guy just wanted to go play the French Horn or something