A little context: That was the year President Lyndon B. People who remember him from that time remember him fondly.”Įllis’ first year in the minor leagues was in 1964. “There’s something about his style and his outspokenness. “Dock resonates pretty well with audience,” Radice continues. He can interact with people in the African American community, and he can appeal to a college professor poet.” “The thing that intrigues me about was that he was able to move into different circles,” Radice says. Hall and Dock became friends while Hall was researching a magazine article on baseball, and he eventually wrote a biography about Ellis in 1976, three years before Ellis retired.
One person drawn into the orbit of Dock was Donald Hall, a college professor who would become the U.S. The novelty drew his eye, but when he looked deeper he became fascinated with his character - an effect, Radice would come to realize, Ellis has on many people. “So I was getting a lot, not a lot, but I was getting a certain amount of anecdotal sharing from people in the audience during festivals, and it kind of made me think about what was the craziest story that I had ever heard.” “ was about kind of the secret history of LSD with the CIA, and something about LSD in particular, I think, causes some people to want to share their experiences,” Radice says. He’s made several short documentaries, including “The Collegians Are Go!!” and “LSD A Go Go.” It was during the production cycle of the latter that he first heard about Ellis’ lysergic no-no.
Baseball lsd game professional#
He died in 2008 of chronic liver failure at the age of 63.ĭirector Jeffrey Radice explores the circumstances that molded Ellis into the type of man who would play professional baseball on acid in No No: A Dockumentary, which is playing at the Boulder International Film Festival fresh from Sundance.
A self-described “angry black man” who idolized Muhammad Ali and who had to sleep in separate hotels from white players while playing in the minor leagues, Ellis was brash, outspoken, stylish and unapologetic for who he was.Īs a player, Ellis had drug problems that ranged beyond LSD, and in his later years he became an outspoken advocate calling for MLB to address drug use among players. But the man was far more complex than that. It’d be easy to dismiss Ellis as a goofy sideshow. He had pitched the 174th no-hitter in Major League Baseball history.
Ellis’ no-hitter wasn’t pretty - his control was all over the place - but at the end of the day, he had made history. Only 282 (depending on how you count) were no-hitters. Since 1876, there have been more than 200,000 professional baseball games played in the United States. To do so while experiencing LSD-induced hallucinations is absolutely outrageous, completely unfathomable. The best pitchers command pinpoint accuracy, and to throw a no-hitter takes a combination of pitching talent, solid defense and luck. The difference between a great pitch and a terrible one is not very far. Robin Williams joked about the feat in his stand-up.īut when looked at from an athletic standpoint, the feat is actually phenomenal.Įllis was a pitcher, and pitching is, as they say, a game of inches. The revelation, made by a somewhat sheepish Ellis, turned him into a minor counterculture star, spawning predictable articles in magazines like High Times and Lysergic World. Years later, he would claim that during the game, he was tripping on LSD. In 1970, Dock Ellis, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, threw a no-hitter.