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“I’ve never played a single game without being stoned or drunk” is one of the first things you hear in No no, the documentary released in 2014 on the life of Dock Ellis, a famous baseball player of the seventies. Ellis himself says it, who immediately afterwards recalls the famous game he played on June 12, 1970 in San Diego: «I couldn’t see the hitters, only which side they were on. At the time, everyone knew I was high, but what they didn’t know was that I was high as I was pitching.” That day Ellis, pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, won the game for his team without allowing a single hit to his opponents while still under the influence of LSD, one of the most powerful psychedelic substances in circulation taken “two or three times » a few hours earlier.
At the time, Ellis was one of the great pitchers in North American baseball. The following year, 1971, was also the best of his career: he was selected to the All-Star Game, was part of the first starting lineup composed entirely of African-Americans and Latinos in major league history and then won the World Series, i.e. the championship finals. With those seasons in Pittsburgh he also landed a one-year signing with baseball’s richest and most famous team, the New York Yankees.
He was an extravagant and unpredictable player, but also aware of the era he was in. Sometimes he showed up on the field with the curlers still on his head, he was always described as one step ahead of the trends of the moment and for this reason too he was often compared to the boxer Muhammad Ali. In still very complicated years due to racial segregation in the United States, he spoke openly about it “in an understandable and logical way”, as the director Ron Howard recalled, who watched him play as a boy and who then involved him in some of his productions.
Before becoming a baseball player, he hadn’t had an easy life. He had developed addictions to alcohol and drugs as a teenager, which he then carried around for a long time. In his high school days, however, it was precisely as a punishment that he started playing baseball: he was found smoking marijuana in the bathrooms and to avoid expulsion he was granted the opportunity to play with the institute team.
He proved to be a particularly good pitcher, and after making his way through the minor leagues of North American baseball, he made his way into the pros in the late 1960s. At the time, the bans on performance-enhancing drugs were not so strict and amphetamines circulated almost freely among the players, as long as they were not discovered by the managers. It was with the so-called “greenies” (dextroamphetamines) that Ellis began to be unable to do without substances, but not so much to remain at the competitive levels required by professionalism, but to «live with the constant idea of failure».
Thus it came to those June days of 1970, when the Pirates flew to California to play a series of championship games against the San Diego Padres. Ellis, who was originally from Los Angeles, obtained time off from his team to visit friends and family in the area. But he began to take LSD already on the road, to arrive in Los Angeles already on a “trip” and then ended up at a friend’s house, where he continued to take LSD by sniffing it, so that it had even more marked effects (usually it is taken by putting small cardboard soaked in substance). There he lost track of time and, thinking it was still Thursday, he didn’t realize that it was actually Friday and that he should have been on the field at six in the afternoon: not in Los Angeles, but in San Diego.
He managed to get there in time but the LSD was still in his system and he—”tripped on acid, high as a Georgia pine” as he once put it—should have been among the first pitchers on the field for his team. Once on the mound he struck out six opposing batters, none of whom hit a single hit. The style of that no hitter (the term used in baseball for that type of performance, very difficult to achieve and therefore still rare) was far from flawless, given that with some throws he hit the opponents on the body, touching the fight several times. But Ellis didn’t notice anything, he continued to pitch without scoring in San Diego, until he ended the game in a final victory for Pittsburgh.
The only help on the field came to him from his catcher, i.e. the teammate who, from behind the opposing hitter, suggests which types of pitches to make, in order to then receive them: to show him, or at least glimpse, the pitch signals made with the hands, covered his fingers with reflective tape. At the end of the game, among the many celebrations for the historic performance, even the Pirates photographer went to Ellis to congratulate him, but he replied asking him what he had done so special.
The truth about that episode remained confined within the team and only began to appear in the 1980s so as not to complicate the end of his career. Initially the story was greeted with skepticism, also caused by the fact that Ellis knew how to hide his altered states very well. But then he himself spoke openly about it, saying among other things: «The ball was sometimes small, sometimes it was big. I concentrated on the catcher’s mitt and chewed some gum until it turned to powder.’
Over the years that episode has become part of American sports culture and is still often mentioned today. The comic actor Robin Williams remembered him for example in one of his last live shows, in a gag in which he said: «Dock Ellis made a no hitter made of LSD. To those who’ve ever taken it: tell others how hard it must be. If I hired him, I’d find myself apologizing to all the blades of grass I step on.”
After his experience with the Yankees, Ellis’ career came to an end in the second half of the 1970s. He was married four times and continued to have problems with alcohol and drugs, but only after an episode of domestic violence against his partner at the time he was convinced to detox. He later became an addiction counselor and worked with both baseball teams and inmates, support groups and other addiction institutions. In 2007, at the age of 63, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, which combined with heart problems caused his death within months. Since 1999 he has been remembered in the Los Angeles baseball sanctuary, along with other great players of the past, for “the distinctive character of his game and the imprint he left on the sports scene”.
– Read also: Drew Robinson returned to play
2023-06-27 13:15:06
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