In some ways, Ellis’s performance for the Pirates against San Diego Padres on Friday 12 June 1970 was not exactly a pitching masterclass. But few of these latter-day myths compare with the unthinkable feat that played out on a misty night in San Diego five decades ago this month, when a 25-year-old right-handed starter for the Pittsburgh Pirates named Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter while tripping on LSD. And every time I faced him, I was scared.T he century-spanning annals of baseball are filled with accomplishments that strain credulity and force us to rethink the outer limits of human potential, like Babe Ruth’s called shot at Wrigley Field or Reggie Jackson’s three home runs on three pitches in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. Dock was and is one of my best friends-I call him my baseball father-but after I left the Pirates, he said he was gonna hit me in the face. I gained a lot of respect for him right there. When he came and said he was gonna hit all those Reds, I thought, 'You ain't gonna do nothing, man.' Then he did it. It was his flamboyance, his perceived militancy and his fearlessness. "Bob Gibson is up there, too, obviously, but with Dock it wasn't just his stuff. "Dock Ellis was without question the most intimidating pitcher of his era," says former MVP and batting champ Dave Parker, who came into the majors on Ellis' 1973 Pittsburgh Pirates. He had, in short, that certain combination of raw talent and insanity that very rarely creates Hall of Famers but almost always creates legends. He hit the first three and walked two before he was pulled. When a heckler called him nigger during a minor league game in Alabama, he entered the stands, sat among the hecklers and said, "What happened to all those niggers up here? All those niggers calling me nigger?" (In Ellis' version of the story, he also has a gun in his pocket.) When the Cincinnati Reds taunted the Pirates after beating them in the 1972 National League Championship Series, Ellis decided to motivate his team by hitting every single batter in the Reds' lineup. When baseball brass complained about his haircut, he wore hair curlers on the field. Brash, gifted and impetuous, he would do almost anything to make a point he believed in. Throughout his 12-year career as a player, he was often labeled a different kind of dangerous. There's that.) In conversation, he's intelligent, funny and what former Rangers owner Brad Corbett calls "dangerously honest."
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(Well, plus the fact that he can't lift his arm over his head, having torn his rotator cuff lifting weights in 1993. And it's the place that, for the past two years, Dock Ellis has called home.Įllis is not a small man-when he drove up in his wife's tiny sports coupe, his knees looked like earrings-and here, now, watching him pace around his front yard, a few flecks of gray are the only suggestion that Ellis' "heavyball" couldn't still kill a small animal. It is, in sum, about as far from major league baseball glory as one could get without a spaceship or a body bag. The high-desert town of Victorville, California, is the last stop on the long road out of Los Angeles, and the place does little to embarrass the word "shithole." It's best known as the home of five prisons, some reportedly very good crystal meth and a kick-ass Long John Silver's its primary attraction to residents is that, unlike the small towns across the mountains in California's central valley, its air does not always smell like burning tires and cowshit. Which, it turns out, was one of the least crazy things that happened to him on that particular day. If something didn't happen in the interim, Dock Philip Ellis, age 25, was about to enter a 50,000-seat stadium and throw a very small ball, very hard, for a very long time, without the benefit of being able to, you know, feel the thing. He had four hours to get to San Diego, warm up and pitch. You slept through Thursday."Įllis remained calm. "You're supposed to pitch today."Įllis focused his mind. She scanned for a moment, then noticed something. Ellis would frequently drop acid on off days and weekends he had a room in his basement christened "The Dungeon," in which he'd lock himself and listen to Jimi Hendrix or Iron Butterfly "for days."Ī bit later, how long exactly he can't recall, he came across Mitzi flipping through a newspaper. He went to sleep in the early morning, woke up sometime after noon and immediately took a dose of Purple Haze acid.
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The next 12 hours were a fog of conversation, screwdrivers, marijuana, and, for Ellis, amphetamines.
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He immediately rented a car and drove to L.A.
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Two days earlier, he'd flown with the Pirates to San Diego for a four-game series with the Padres.
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Thirty-five years ago, on June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate and future Texas Rangers pitcher Dock Ellis found himself in the Los Angeles home of a childhood friend named Al Rambo.