Based in Pasadena, Calif., the reliquary is a sort of people's bizarre Hall of Fame, an organization with no permanent home and an eccentric collection of baseball artifacts that includes the jockstrap worn by 3-foot-7 pinch hitter Eddie Gaedel, who walked in his only major league plate appearance. True story: In the summer of 1999, Ellis became the inaugural member of the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals. A tip from Pirates fan David Lander, better known as the actor who played Squiggy on "Laverne & Shirley." Stranger things have happened.įor instance, Ellis' claiming that he received the LSD in question from Leary himself. He knew to ask because he was working off a tip. Instead, Ellis recorded a 2-0, no-hit victory against the Padres - and 14 years later, the pitcher confirmed to reporter Bob Smizik of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he had played the game on acid. Barring that, he could have kept his mouth shut. Never bothered with catching an afternoon flight to San Diego, let alone catching a cab to the stadium. A mash-up of popping, psychedelic colors and stark, black-and-white drawings, the film depicts the pitcher as a literal human cartoon - when an animated Ellis covers a grounder at first base, he yelps, "I just made a touchdown!"Īfter all, Ellis could have called in sick. Type "Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No." You'll find a popular, award-winning No Mas short film about the game, illustrated and animated by artist James Blagden and featuring audio from a 2008 NPR interview of Ellis by Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel. The first line in Ellis' Los Angeles Times obituary reads, " the former major league pitcher who claimed to have thrown a no-hitter while on LSD." Claimed? Ellis didn't claim. Not surprisingly, all of this has been forgotten. Friedman, who as a child met Ellis at New York's Shea Stadium, struck up a friendship and later dedicated his first book to the pitcher. Legendary skateboard and music photographer Glen E. To this day, he is sorely missed by those who knew and loved him. He changed my world."Įllis died of complications stemming from chronic liver disease in a Los Angeles hospital on Dec. "There's no doubt about that in my mind whatsoever. "If I had never met Dock, I would probably be dead or doing life ," said John Shandy, a 35-year-old Long Beach resident and recovering addict who was counseled by Ellis while incarcerated. He later became a drug counselor, working with addicts, inmates and troubled youth. He was a husband, a brother, an uncle and a father. He played 10 major league seasons, won 138 games and was a key member of the 1976 New York Yankees. Charles Barkley with a touch of Ozzie Guillen. "What happened to yesterday?"īetter question: What happened to Ellis? He was a 1970s sports icon, outspoken and controversial, loathed and adored. Meanwhile, Mitzi flipped through a newspaper.
Around noon - maybe earlier - he took another dose of LSD. "I'm as high as a Georgia pine," he said. He showed up at the home of Mitzi, the girlfriend of an old childhood buddy, Al Rambo. Drove north to his hometown, Los Angeles. The club arrived on Thursday, an off day.
The rest is a matter of memory, largely Ellis', imperfect and addled, culled from interviews, articles and books. The Pirates were in town to play the San Diego Padres, starting their first West Coast trip of the season. In the words of a teammate, "not afraid of nothing." He was 25 years old, a right-handed starter for the Pittsburgh Pirates, armed with a big curveball and a bigger mouth, a tall, chubby-faced kid who ran like a fawn. Two hours later, he would be standing on the mound at San Diego Stadium, throwing baseballs he couldn't always feel, in the general direction of batters he didn't always see, trying very, very hard not to fall over. Six hours earlier, Ellis had been in Los Angeles, nursing a hangover, dazed and confused, enjoying what he thought was his day off. The perfect moment for the first and only known no-hitter in major league history pitched under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide, thrown by the first and only player in major league history to inspire both a biography penned by a future American poet laureate and a seminal article in High Times. Three years after psychedelic Pied Piper Timothy Leary invited America to "Turn on, tune in and drop out." Four years before Richard Nixon's resignation marked an inglorious denouement to the counterculture era. So yeah, maybe the words aren't verbatim. I got to pitch." Decades later, Dock Ellis remembered it like this: sitting in a taxi outside the San Diego airport, running late for work, tripping on acid.