Better Pitching Through Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

Dock Ellis did it his way.

One of the more foolish principles of Major League Baseball back in the 1970s was the idea that any player who had a sense of humor, dared to speak up when he had something to say, or refused to walk in unquestioning lockstep with every other player in the league was a “flake,” someone to be smirked at, if not openly degraded and ridiculed.

One could readily argue that these men were actually just human beings with functioning vocal cords and an operative sense of self who were living in a free country (I know, I know), but that’s not how baseball looked at it. If they were outlandish enough to repeatedly break the team’s dress code or say amusing things to reporters, they were nuts, and holy cow—get a load of this guy!

I have more than a little bit of experience with this type of ballplayer, as I once researched and wrote, and very nearly got filmed, a screenplay loosely based on the shenanigans of former Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee (see “script now residing on a shelf at Paramount Pictures, Paul Tatara edition”). Bill, who has read a handful of books about philosophy and politics and quotes them whenever he gets a chance, was a relatively smart fish in a dumb locker room, liked to smoke pot, and possessed the previously mentioned dreaded sense of humor. He also thought he was 100% right roughly 150% of the time.

He was, in effect, very much like millions of other American twenty-somethings who despised the Silent Majority and listened to Led Zeppelin in their patchouli-scented apartments. But that was enough for a series of Red Sox managers and team officials to view Bill as a certifiable Major Problem, and his career suffered for it.

He got a lot of press out of it anyway, and college kids in Boston loved him.

That said, Bill was a cheap-jack class clown next to journeyman pitcher Dock Ellis, who also tossed the ball for a decent living back when the grass was usually AstroTurf and you didn’t have to take out a small loan to buy a hot dog and a beer at the stadium.

Ellis didn’t just march to the beat of a different drum the way Bill did. Spiritually speaking, Dock Ellis slapped upright bass for the Sun Ra Arkestra.

---

Ellis—seen here feelin’ so good with Chuck Mangione—was a very respectable, as opposed to spectacular, right-hander who labored for the Pirates, the Yankees, Oakland, Texas, and the Mets over the course of an eleven-year career. He went 19-9 with a 3.09 ERA for Pittsburgh in 1971, won a game in that year’s World Series, and ended up with a championship ring, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but other pitchers you’ve never heard of have had similar seasons.

Nevertheless, Ellis will forever be remembered by hardcore baseball fans for a degree of free-spiritedness mixed with anger over the trauma of institutionalized racism that left other supposedly oddball players eating his dust. Sometimes he was hilarious, and sometimes his behavior was genuinely questionable. But he was always Dock Ellis, from the moment he woke up in the morning until he collapsed into bed at night, usually way past his team of the moment’s required check-in time.

Ellis’ self-determination vibrated with a freewheeling “fuck you” je ne sais quoi. It’s not hard to imagine him sitting down for a full picnic lunch on the mound if he felt like it.

He was known for doing vicious/amusing impersonations of umpires, managers, and other players in the locker room and went searching for zombies when he played winter ball in the Dominican Republic. And when he pitched against the Reds on May 1, 1974, he opened the game by deliberately hitting Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Dan Driessen with pitches, then threw two more behind Tony Perez’s undoubtedly terrified noggin before walking him. Then he buzzed one behind Johnny Bench’s head (that’s three Hall of Famers and Pete Rose, however you want to count him) before Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh pulled him from the game. Less than one inning, and he was sitting down.

Ellis later stated that the Reds had been talking smack about the Pirates during spring training after beating them in the NLCS the previous season, so he decided to put the fear of God in them. He also hit Reggie Jackson in the face with a pitch one time because of a towering home run Jackson belted off of him in the All-Star game five years earlier.

Messages delivered.

During the same season when he attacked the Reds, he also got into hot water with the Pirates for wearing curlers in his hair while warming up before a game. He defended himself by pointing out, not inaccurately, that Black men all over America were then curling their hair and that the Pirates needed to get with the program. The times were changing.

Dock was not Whitey Ford, nor was he any other type of whitey, and he had no time for this shit. Needless to say, the Pirates did not get with the program, but the times continued to change nevertheless.

In later years, Ellis stated that some of his more puzzling escapades stemmed from his being addicted to amphetamines, barbiturates, and alcohol, as the pressures of being a Black ballplayer with white owners and managers and racist fans constantly riding his ass got to be too much for him. On a positive note, this unforgivable blackness (a description once applied to the provocatively proud and charismatic heavyweight champion Jack Johnson) made Dock part of an historic civil rights moment.

Check out this clip from “No No: a Dockumentary,” Jeffrey Radice’s 2014 film about Ellis.

That’s pretty damn cool.

Ellis’ substance abuse problems were, of course, highly unfortunate, and he commendably devoted himself to helping other addicts when his playing days were over and he managed to clean himself up. But his bent toward recreational drugs generated one of the more amazing feats in all of baseball history, not that you’ll find an installation celebrating it at Cooperstown— on June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid!

---

You read that right. Ellis revealed in his imaginatively titled autobiography, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, that the gem he tossed against the San Diego Padres on June 12, 1970, was aided and abetted by a hefty sampling of LSD, the very same stuff P-Funk’s George Clinton ingested before hunkering down to write "Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)."

Ellis said he took a high dose of the ol’ lysergic before traveling back home to Los Angeles during a break in the Pirates’ schedule, then thought a single day had passed when it had actually been three! His friend’s girlfriend woke him up from what must have been a very interesting dream to gently inform him of his mistake. She also pointed out that he was slated to pitch that day. Ellis didn’t believe her, so she showed him the sports section of the newspaper.

Whoops.

I was about to wonder right now why Ellis didn’t just phone the club and say he ate some bad clams or something, but he probably didn’t do that because he was high on LSD! It’s not that he wasn’t thinking. He just wasn’t thinking like a normal human being.

He somehow got his drastically buzzing ass on a plane and flew out to San Diego (the Pirates were due to play the Padres), and, rather than spending the afternoon trying to, let’s say, capture laughter in a jar, he went ahead and threw a no-hitter through the tangerine-starburst haze of a major hallucinogen.

Sometimes Ellis thought the ball was really big. Other times he thought it was really small. He said he couldn’t actually see the batters, but he was able to tell which side of the plate they were standing on and pitched accordingly. At one point, he was convinced the home plate umpire was none other than Richard M. Nixon!

Although he was usually known for his impeccable control—outside of when he was intentionally nailing those who offended him—Ellis walked nine batters during the game, making this gem an especially poorly cut one. But it was still a no-hitter. They don’t perform a sobriety test when you’re finished, and they wouldn’t have been able to detect the LSD that way if they had bothered to do one.

This seismic event happened, it’s worth noting, in front of several thousand working-class San Diego schmoes who would have been aghast had they known what was going on. But many of them were probably one Schlitz over the line anyway, if not two or three or four. So pick your poison.

Dock Ellis is dead now, because that's what eventually happens regardless of how hip you are, and if they have a baseball league in heaven, St. Peter, if not God Himself, will undoubtedly hear some chin music if he pisses Dock off. I’ll bet, though, that they aren’t so uptight about the curlers up there, and the beds are almost surely king-size— Ellis once abandoned the hotel the Pirates were staying at during a playoff series in San Francisco because, he said, the beds were too small.