In the summer of 1970, Dock Ellis, playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, pitched a no-hitter under the influence of LSD. He had taken the doses after having misremembered his schedule, thinking it was an off day. On the field he was psyched--he later said that he “had a feeling of euphoria.” His fellow Pirates might have attributed his erratic behavior to bennies--not uncommonly used by MLB players at the time. And they might have attributed the 8 BBs (that is Base on Balls and not Intentional Walks--nobody quite sure what was going on) to Ellis’ shoot-from-the-hip, aim-for-the-head mindset. In 1974 he tried to hit every player on the Cincinnati Reds lineup, only getting ejected from the game after having pegged Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Dan Driessen, et al., and thrown two attempted fastballs aimed at the head of Johnny Bench. Safety helmets had recently been made mandatory for batters. Ellis might have been able to justify his actions. But there was no way he could have justly pegged a player in his no-no, when sometimes he was seeing “Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate.” No--there was no way he could have beaned the “Wild Man from Borneo.” And especially not when “Richard Nixon was the home-plate umpire.” The stakes were simply too high.
James Blagden, an artist familiar with the high stakes of high subjects, has taken a break from his depictions of junkiesque-ly sprawled Ninja Turtles and psychedelic race utopias and dystopias to animate Dock Ellis’ momentous game, which has been suppressed by MLB for nearly 40 years. The Slanch Report has started an online petition to get MLB to air the Ellis LSD No-Hitter. Until the world gathers enough signatures, we can thank Blagden for illustrating this extraordinary moment in baseball history.
a life is stranger than fiction occurence