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.