Forty years later, baseball fans still believing in Sidd Finch-like hope

Would you like another reason why baseball is just different than other sports? Here’s why: On Monday the sport was seized by the latest in batsmanship — and could you even imagine the look on Abner Doubleday’s face if, sometime in the 1870s or so, someone had informed the good general that someday there would be an invention called the “torpedo bat?”

That was a fun day, because that new bat story managed to touch on both the ultra-serious and the ultra-silly. But it is also a real-life thing.

Tuesday was for something else: A lot of deep reflections about the greatest baseball story that never actually happened. Forty years earlier — April 1, 1985 — Sports Illustrated had given over its back-of-the-book “bonus” piece to the great George Plimpton, and Plimpton told the story of an unknown Tibetan pitcher named Sidd Finch, who’d been wowing the folks in Mets camp in St. Petersburg with a fastball that touched 168 miles per hour.

It was a loony tunes story that had just enough believability that, well, people sorta kinda believed it for a few days.