The discovery of a superhuman baseball pitcher who throws 168-mph fastballs (when the game's top hurlers rarely clock 100) would be explosive news indeed.

But easily duped sports fans didn't seem to question that the bombshell was instead subtly unveiled in a lengthy, carefully crafted article written by George Plimpton in a 1985 Sports Illustrated magazine.

The story profiled a 28-year-old "eccentric mystic" quietly training with the New York Mets. Hayden Sidd Finch was a former English orphan, a one-time Harvard student who learned to throw in Tibet -- and completely the fictitious imagining of Plimpton.

Mets fans and other sports fanatics swooned. But they might have paid closer attention to the words spelled out by the first letters of the story's secondary headline: "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent lifestyle, Sidd's deciding about yoga -- and his future in baseball." (Happy April Fools' Day -- ah fib.)

No. 2: Alabama Pi - 1998

A notable event in the early history of hoaxes involving the Internet was a fake news story that reported the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the mathematical value of pi from 3.14159 (and the infinite number of digits that follow) to a simple round 3 because that's what the Bible teaches.

The author was listed as April Holiday, who worked for the news service "The Associalized Press."

The story was written by a scientist named Mark Boslough as a parody of attacks on the teaching of evolution. He pitched it to the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, which published it. Boslough quickly posted his confession that it was a hoax, but the story lived on. Forwarded versions began to appear online that deleted the fictitious writer and news organization.

Alabama lawmakers were deluged with complaints and forced to explain that they had not concocted a new pi recipe.