With baseball season just around the corner and hope springing (maybe more like leaking) eternal for my beloved Kansas City Royals, I am compelled to spread the annual word about Sidd Finch.

Sidd Finch, as it turned out, was a figment of George Plimpton’s imagination but on April 1, 1985, he was very real. The Sports Illustrated cover story for that week told ravenous baseball fans about Hayden (Sidd) Finch, a 28-year old New York Met Rookie, hiking boot wearing, Disney type character that could throw a fastball 168 miles an hour – and we believed.

The story was so popular that SI still archives it 20 years later. And, The New York Times did a story today on Sidd.

Plimpton even wrote a book based on the character – The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

Okay, the moral of the marketing story here – Tell a story, a fabulous story, make up a character, give your marketing message something that people want to believe. . . and they will.

The end!