The first of April. It has so many connotations but perhaps the most frustrating of all is that today is April Fool’s Day. The history of this “holiday” dates back to the mid-1500’s. Historians suggest that the celebration came about in 1582 when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Anyone who didn’t get the memo that New Year’s was now January instead of April celebrated the new year 4 months too late. Those people were ridiculed and became the butt of jokes and hoaxes taking advantage of their naivety.

Pranks have long been a part of baseball lore. There have been cases where teammates have removed the wheels of someone’s car and hidden them around the stadium for the unsuspecting victim to try to recover.

When teammates find a “fish” to hook with a prank they can be ruthless. Former outfielder Jeff Francoeur learned that lesson the hard way in 2014. After signing with the San Diego Padres, Francoeur was assigned to Triple-A El Paso. There his teammates convinced him that pitcher Jorge Reyes was deaf. The team kept up the ruse for over a month before finally letting him in on the joke. The entire prank was chronicled in a video entitled, On Jeff Ears. To Francoeur’s credit, he was very compassionate to Reyes trying to be supportive of his teammate who was overcoming deafness to chase his dream to be a professional baseball player.

While the Francoeur prank was epic, there is one that tops them all. A baseball prank so great that it spawned a book and caused thousands of people to question what is reality and what is fiction. I have written about this before but there is never an April Fool’s Day that goes by that I don’t remember that epic prank in 1985.

For those of a younger generation you may not have heard of Sidd Finch nor his creator George Plimpton. Plimpton was a great sports writer who took a different take on reporting. He may not have been the first to create the genre of participatory reporting, but he definitely perfected it.

In 1958 he took the mound prior to a post-season exhibition game at Yankee Stadium pitching against the National League. This would later become part of the book Out of My League. He sparred for three rounds with Sugar Ray Robinson to write about the experience for Sports Illustrated. In 1963 Plimpton went to training camp with the Detroit Lions where he was a backup quarterback and turned that experience into the book Paper Lion.

Plimpton was a great writer who was able to pull his readers into a world we rarely understood. So, when Sports Illustrated asked him to write a fictional piece for their April 1, 1985 magazine, he leapt at the chance creating perhaps the most fascinating baseball player who never played the game.

The great part about the Sidd Finch story was how Sports Illustrated and George Plimpton were able to get the New York Mets and some of their players to go along with this fairy tale. While the Mets were on an upswing, for most of their existence they were not good. When your team is perpetually bad, a fan will believe almost anything if it has the chance to help the team win.

Who wouldn’t get excited to hear that your team had found a guy who through the use of Buddhist teachings had found a way to throw a baseball 168 MPH. And to hear the Mets pitching coach talk about him would make you salivate at how far your team could go. How many of us have thought the same way when your favorite team signs a big-name star or has a no-miss prospect destined to be a superstar?

One of the sometimes-forgotten characters in this saga is Joe Berton. Berton was a middle school art teacher who had friends that worked at Sports Illustrated and he was convinced to play the part of Sidd Finch. Berton was a huge baseball fan rooting for the Chicago Cubs. He immediately agreed thinking what better way for a Cubs fan to prank another team within their division.

Like with the Francoeur prank, Plimpton and Sports Illustrated were able to keep the Sidd Finch saga alive. It wasn’t until a week after the initial publication that the magazine finally fessed up that this was all an April Fool’s joke. Little did they know that 34 years later it would still be among the top five pranks ever concocted. Well done, just please don’t tell Diamondbacks fans that the team has traded for Paul Goldschmidt returning him from St. Louis. That wound is still too new and at this moment we might believe anything.