When Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis awoke on Friday, June 12, 1970, he was a little hazy on the previous evening’s details. He was aware that the team had flown in to San Diego late Wednesday afternoon following a series against the Giants. And he knew his manager, Danny Murtaugh, had given him permission to drive to his hometown of Los Angeles to visit friends. He also seemed to “know” that it was Thursday, not Friday. He was due to pitch on Friday, so, thinking today was a day off, he looked around the house to see if anything recreational may be available. He found it in the form of a tab of LSD, which he crushed and snorted. His host for the visit walked in just when Dock finished it off.

“What are you doing?? You’re pitching tonight!”

Dock told her it was no problem, he’s not pitching until Friday.

“It IS Friday!”

He looked at the newspaper and sure enough, it was Friday.

“What happened to Thursday?”

Dock Ellis made it San Diego Stadium with 90 minutes to spare for his 6:05p start. The performance on the mound wasn’t exactly a masterpiece. He threw roughly 150 pitches, walking eight, and plunking one. His teammate Bob Moose was trying to help Dock chart his pitches, but he gave up at some point because Ellis was throwing all over the place. No matter, 2-1/2 hours later, Dock Ellis threw strike three past Ed Spiezio, and baseball’s most infamous no-hitter was completed.

It took until 1984 for Dock to divulge the circumstances under which he pitched that day. He claimed to have not been able to feel the ball, see his catcher other than the tape on his fingers, or see any of the hitters other than which side of the plate they were on. Complete-game footage does not exist (or has never been released by MLB), though snippets would be included in the great 2014 documentary on the game, No No: A Dockumentary.

When he finally confessed about his pitching condition that day, he said “I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate, I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”

His antics didn’t stop there. In 1973, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had to tell Dock personally that he couldn’t wear his hair curlers on the field.

In a 1974 game against Cincinnati, he decided for himself that he was going to intimidate the Reds and plunk every player on The Big Red Machine. He hit the first three batters, then threw high heat over the heads of both Johnny Bench and Tony Perez before getting himself pulled. Pitching for Oakland in 1977, he set off the clubhouse sprinkler system when he set fire to the pitching charts provided for him.

But he was also a dominant pitcher, amassing a career 138-119 record with the Pirates, A’s, Yankees, Rangers, and Mets. He lead the Yanks to a pennant in 1976, going 17-8 with a 3.19 ERA. He was also outspoken on the rights of Black players in baseball and frequently pointed out the institutionalized racism in the game at that time. He started the 1971 All-Star Game for the NL against A’s pitcher Vida Blue, the first time in MLB history that two Black pitchers started the game.

Today’s Playlist is a SomethingIsHappening compendium of Doctor songs in honor of Dock Ellis’s LSD no-hitter 54 years ago today on June 12, 1970:

#DockEllis #PittsburghPirates #MLB #NoHitter #NewYorkYankees #Fastball #JohnnyBench #BigRedMachine #Cincinnati #Baseball #SanDiegoPadres