June 7, 2018 • 36 mins
Almost 48 years ago, Pirates pitcher and notorious party animal Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. How did this man accomplish one of the rarest feats in baseball history while, by his own admission, tripping balls? Join the guys as they dive into the story of that legendary afternoon, along with the parts of Dock's legacy that are too often forgotten in the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
Yea quick bait and switch at the top of the show,
Ladies and Gentlemen, friends and neighbors. You may have thought
you are tuning into a podcast, but for the moment,
(00:34):
you are at a baseball game. Here the crowd, smell,
the popcorn, the hot dogs, the distant crack of a
baseball bat, the stale urine, the sale you're in, the
the beer that somehow smells both like beer and stale.
You're a sort of a Milans. Really, it all sort
of comes together. And what's the word mi asthma, my asthma,
(00:55):
A collage for the senses, a cavalcade need of experience. Hello,
my name is Ben, my name is Nolan. We love words.
We love words almost as much as we love our
super producer, Casey batter Up pegrum No. I was wondering
now that we're at this hypothetical baseball game. Uh, were
(01:19):
you much of a baseballer? Yeah? And I played the
outfield when I was like in elementary school. But I
was you know, I was a turn rested development. Yeah,
I was no good and I just looking around, you know,
just smelling the p not really being a very effective
part of the team. Wait, you were in uh stale
(01:40):
urine soaked little league. They all they all smelled like that, Ben,
from the little leagues to the minor leagues to the
major leagues, they all smell like p Well, we did
grow up. I do love that unintentional ryme. We did
grow up in different towns. I associated with the smell
of pe nuts. I was also an outfield guy, so
maybe that's what I'm peanuts. Peanuts. There we go. I'm sorry,
(02:03):
I was confused. No, no, not at all. So it's
strange because one of the most uh one of the
most beautiful series of memories that I have from growing
up is that in the early nineties you could get
very very cheap field side seats and that was my
primary informative experience with baseball until we started doing ridiculous
(02:28):
history and exploring some of the strange baseball stories, most
particularly Curse of the Colonel. But even if you haven't
played baseball, or even if you hate baseball ridiculous historians,
you have probably experienced one of the most amazing cognitive
things that humans are capable of experiencing. Dropping acid. I
(02:49):
was gonna say flow state cool. It's one of those too. Yeah,
there are many roads to the room known as the
flow state meditation in exercise LSD. And today today our
story encounters all three baseball LSD and the flow states true. Uh,
(03:14):
at least it is commonly accepted it is true. Right,
So well, could you could you set the scene? Could
you take us there? Yeah, I will take you there. Um.
It was a Friday on June twelfth of nineteen seventy, Um,
right on the tail end of you know the rule
in sixties. That's not what they were called. That was
the twenties. What were the sixties. What's a good adjective
(03:36):
for the sixties? Uh, the vibrant, the vibrant, unbridled, unhinged,
tune in, free, long, dropout, free, love, free, free, free,
all that stuff. Um. And you know a big part
of that was a guy named Timothy Leary who was
he worked at Harvard in the laboratories there, but he
(03:58):
researched with the effects of psychedelic drugs on the mind,
and he became this kind of uh Sevengali of the
sixties and of psychedelic experiences. Guru figure, that's true. And
there was another guy named Doc Ellis on that day,
June twe who was a fantastic pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates,
(04:24):
and he had just arrived at the stadium in San Diego, California,
to be the starting pitcher for a game against the
San Diego Padres. But here's the problem. He got there
just an hour and a half, ninety minutes before he's
supposed to be on the field, and he is not
(04:45):
sober because he's coming in and he had no idea
that he was supposed to play today. In fact, he
has partied to a cartoonish degree the night before, right,
he's dropped acid. He drank like a fish. Uh. And
he woke up the same day and I think it
(05:06):
was about what what about noon that he took another
hit of acid. Yeah, he was in Los Angeles, it
was his hometown. The game was in San Diego. He
thought he had a day off. He did have a
day off, but he burned through that day off, um,
as you just described. And then he woke up at
around noon after having taken another hit. Uh. And it
was a friend, a girlfriend of one of his childhood
(05:27):
friends who he was hanging out with and then crashed
over there with UM showed him the newspaper the day's newspaper,
the sports page more specifically, which said, hey, you're the
starting pitcher for this game that's about to happen today
in San Diego. So he got all this stuff together
(05:47):
right into the airport while tripping on LSD. Mind you
caught an afternoon flight and a cab directly to the stadium.
And here's the there's this great article on ESPN by
Patrick Ruby that explains it this way. And this is
according to doc Ellis himself. He landed in the San
(06:09):
Diego airport, he hopped in a cab outside, and all
he said was, Casey, can you beat me on this?
Get to the stadium? I got a pitch, Yeah, and
pitch he did. Um. You know what's funny. I'm thinking
about all this, and I'm thinking about just the stress
of going to the airport in general, and like being
on a tight timeline and being worried about missing your
(06:31):
flight or being worried about missing your appointment or whatever.
Can you imagine that with the added stress of uh,
you know, being in an altered state. Yeah. I was
thinking about this because you know, stress can be such
a personal thing, you know. I was wondering how much
would it stress him out? To me, being late for
something is more stressful than going to an airport. I
(06:53):
hate being late for stuff, But regardless of which way
you look at it, compounding that with a altered state
of consciousness, and then also compounding that with the fact
that you are a public performer. You're an athlete, right,
who's going to be performing in crowd. It's not like
you're late to your job as an archivist in a
(07:15):
basement where no one will see you for eight hours.
He was also twenty five years old, known for his
curveball and his partying days. That's that's another thing that
makes me wonder about his state of stress in this
moment was because it wasn't like this was his first bender,
not at all, not at all. And we will get
(07:35):
to that, but let's let's hear a little clip that
does a really good job of summing up how it
might have felt to be standing in that particular situation,
in that particular state of mind. There was one guy,
one guy who had an amazing claim to fame in
terms of drugs in sports. His name was Docullis, and
doc Ellis did an incredible thing. The one person who knows,
(07:57):
thank you, duc Ellis pitched a no hitter on LSD.
Those who have taken LSD tell the others how hard
that might be. If I took LSD, I'd be talking
to every blade of grass like sorry, sorry, sorry for
walk into a Major League Baseball stadium, like the whole
(08:21):
fields like okay, so your little creative license there from
Robin Williams um. But he did tip us off to
the outcome of this, this this thing that duc Ellis did.
He pitched a no hitter. Yes, and this is an
incredibly rare feat and a hundred and thirty six years
(08:42):
of baseball history, only two hundred and seventy six no
hitters have ever been recorded, and as far as we know,
this is the only one that occurred under the influence
of LSD. And it's strange because you would expect maybe
he would call out of the game, made he would
show up and have an abysmal performance, But he played
(09:06):
on acid not only well but spectacularly. He also did
walk quite a few batters, but no one hit a
ball that he threw. And additionally, no one knew that
he was on LSD, or virtually no one. It wasn't
until fourteen years later that Ellis confirmed to a reporter
at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that he had played the
(09:29):
game on acid. And the reporter, Bob Smithic, brought this
up because he was working off a tip somebody had
told them there was a rumor. Also, Ellis didn't just
say that he took acid. He said he took acid
that he received from Tim Leary, the guru himself. He
(09:52):
did say that thing. Then it's very true, um, and
it's it's a problematic story, um. For a few reasons
come from that ESPN article that we talked about earlier.
But it's called the Long Strange Trip of Doc Ellis.
But it wasn't Smizic that Doc told that particular part
of the story too. It was later when he was
inducted into something called the Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the
(10:17):
Eternals that was in Pasadena, California, and he was talking
to the executive director named Terry Cannon, who he told
that Leary, that former Harvard psych professor, had given him
the drug because he wanted to see he wanted to
test how it would affect a professional athlete. That's a
(10:39):
weird claim, though, isn't it. It's a very weird claim,
a claim that has several serious problems that are outlined
beautifully in this article. One of the big ones right
off the bat was that during this time Leary was
in fact incarcerated, and that comes from his biography Robert Greenfield. Yeah.
And then another thing is he said that he got
the acid from U c l A laboratory and also
(11:03):
people on Leary's side I don't agree. Yeah. Leary actually
has a personal archivist, a guy named Michael Horowitz, that
said this was just almost definitely focus based on, I
think probably most specifically the fact that he was in jail.
But he did say that Leary knew about the new
hitter and found out about it, and that he had
purchased Leary uh some of Doc Ellis's baseball cards, and
(11:26):
that Leary carried one around with him for the rest
of his life to show off to fans of psychedelics
and sports. Right, So if we look at the timeline here,
that makes it sound much more likely that Leary, while
a fan, learned of this experience afterwards rather than beforehand.
(11:48):
You know what I mean, I do know what you mean.
And it's it's interesting too, because Ellis had, as you said,
been a reputation that it was not only about partying,
but was it just about being kind of his own
kind of free spirit in general. He kind of did
things his own way, marched to his own drummer, and
(12:09):
you know, you get the gist. Yeah. Yeah. He described
himself as arrogant, flamboyant, and controversial. There's an article from
The Washington Post by Matt Shootel that explains some of
Ellis's erratic behavior, or at least depicts it. He was
known for throwing balls directly at batters, arguing when managers
(12:31):
and players from other teams, and he even chased Heckler's
in the stands. So you know, there are a lot
of fans of sports who will heckel the opposing teams players.
This was a guy who would come after you, oh
big time, which is crazy. And he came up in
the minors like he was like, I think eighteen years
old when he got recruited, maybe nineteen when he first
(12:52):
started playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and this was during
a time of horrible racial inequality in the United States.
He refused in many ways to fit in that stereotypical
cookie cutter image that mass media and the culture of
the time would try to force people into based on
(13:14):
what they perceived as what this person should be like
or what they were doing. One of my favorite examples
he once showed up in the Pirates bullpen wearing hair
curlers because he said that the resulting moisture on his
head would help him throw his signature and illegal spit ball, yeah,
very illegalist pitball is an illegal pitch um where the
(13:34):
picture actually changes the way the ball contacts the hand
by putting spit or some kind of like foreign substance
like petroleum jelly or in this case the sweat off
of the back of his neck. Um. But yeah, he
actually got issued a letter from the commissioner of Major
League Baseball ordering him not to wear hair curlers. Um.
(13:56):
And the thing with him was he just didn't like
being told what to do. And he might have come
off as erratic or um just willful, but he kind
of knew what he was doing. According to a lot
of his childhood friends, people that have known him his
whole life that were interviewed in a really cool movie
called No No, a documentary d O c K d
(14:17):
O c K, which is excellent and a really good
deep dive into this very divisive and interesting man's life. Um.
So in the film, another picture named Steve Blasts said
that in those days, which was the sixties, they were
playing a lot of day games, so everyone was showing
up completely hungover UM, and one way that you dealt
(14:42):
with that was by taking amphetamines. Yeah. See history today
remembers doc Ellis primarily as the guy who pitched a
no hitter while he was on LSD. But there are
a couple of things are misremembered there. One is the
(15:03):
nature of LST or acid and how high he would
have been actually, And then the second thing is that
was not the normal thing. It was much more normal
for players to be consuming amphetamines. Yeah, several players from
that era were interviewed for this film, and I think
(15:23):
the number got as high as like nine percent. These
guys are obviously, you know, um editorializing here a little bit.
There's no poll that was taken. But they were in
the game, you know, they were around these guys and
they knew what UM was done. And it wasn't like
people weren't juicing in those days. They weren't taking steroids necessarily.
They were popping Benny's and greenies or deximill right, which
(15:46):
was drug of choice. And this was kind of before
the era of widespread steroid use. So one thing we
have want to do in the exploration of this story
is established that, yeah, Doc Ellis may have been the
only person on the field on LSD, but that doesn't
(16:10):
mean he was the only person on the field on
drugs in an altered state. In an altered state, right,
because I mean the thing about you know, those kinds
of amphetamine is the kind of stuff that fighter pilots
would take, you know, during World War Two, Um Hitler
was quite fond of them. Not to equate baseball players
from the sixties with Adolf Hitler, but it was certainly
a tool of war, and sports are nothing if not
(16:33):
organized war where nobody dies. You know. That's one of
the more popular philosophical interpretations of athleticism that goes back,
you know, into ancient days, right, right, we're at the
chop heads. Although people might die of like heat stroke
or you know, uh, some sort of traumatic brain injury
over time, but typically you would not see people carried
(16:56):
off of the field of baseball in a stretcher. And
there was also a pro cannabis culture at the time, Right,
it was not uncommon for athletes to also smoke weed.
It's true, and I'm wondering, Ben, I couldn't quite find this.
But when when did it? Like if this was such
common knowledge or it just seems so obvious. I did
see a trainer saying I didn't want this in my
locker room. Don't let me see you doing it. But
(17:18):
certainly seemed quite pervasive. Um, when was it that, like
widespread drug testing became a thing in Major League baseball? Yeah,
you have to wonder if it was a result of
widespread drug test policies. Maybe players only stopped doing this
stuff when it became a fiable or find herble offense, right,
(17:40):
other than someone writing a angry letter to you. There's
also a question about how much drug use really has dwindled.
According to an article by Huffington's Post written by Andy
Martino in current and former baseball players have said as
many as twenty of Major League baseball players have used cocaine.
(18:05):
So is it a situation where there are fewer altered
states or is this situation where the type of drug
changes but drug use still exist. Yeah, I'm not quite sure.
I'm not quite sure either. But it's mystifying because as
a fairly square person myself, I would just imagine that
these all have radically different effects, right, I would think so, Ben. Um.
(18:28):
Here's the thing too about Doc ellis he you know,
we talked about the drug use, we talked about him
being a bit of a loose cannon, but he was
described by a lot of his friends in this documentary
as being uh controlled crazy. They called him controlled crazy.
He knew how to keep his wild behavior in check
and to do it just enough so that it could
(18:49):
make him money, like Dennis Robin style. Right, so there
might be some marketing there, some focused application of eccentricity
or insanity. That's right, because you have to think too.
In those days, especially during There's no Hitter, African American
pop culture had really infiltrated the mainstream, and Doc was
a flashy guy. He had fashion sense. He liked to
(19:09):
wear big, loud colors and big, you know, clinky clogs
and bell bottoms, and he was like one of the
first guys to wear an earring. Um very ahead of
his time culturally, at least in terms of baseball. Because
he actually was quoted as saying when talking about Um
the nineteen seventy one All Star Game that baseball was
(19:30):
pretty backwards when it came to black players, and there
was a controversy because he really liked to stir stuff up,
and in the press he came out and said, you
were not gonna put two brothers against each other in
this All Star Game, meaning they had already said that
they were going to start the American League team with
(19:51):
Vida Blue, who was a black pitcher, and Doc thought
that he was gonna not get to start for his
league because a guy named Sparky Anderson, a white guy, UM,
was probably gonna get that privilege. So he got the
media all stirred up and was kind of able to
bait them into getting him exactly what he wanted, and
he was He started in the All Star Game, right Yeah.
(20:12):
And it's strange because looking back and in his later
interviews when he sobered up, Ellis said that he did
not remember a lot of these activities. Not only did
he not remember a lot of the details of his
legendary no hitter run, he also said he didn't remember
(20:34):
much of nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy in general.
It's like, what is it Matt LeBlanc and Friends. He
said he couldn't remember like a whole season of that
show because he was on so many pills the whole time.
I can't imagine not remembering like a whole year, I mean, did.
It could happen for a number of reasons. I've got
a I got a few fuzzy ones. I think I'm
gonna take us down a really brief side trail here
(20:56):
that listeners from some of our other shows are familiar with.
Regardless of what sort of substances you may or may
not take throughout your life, your memory is treacherous and
works against you. But for sure because every time you're
remembering something, you're not remembering the event, you're remembering the
last time you remembered it. So you're playing a game
of telephone with yourself. That's why you will see, uh,
(21:17):
even an accounts we've presented in this show. That's why
we'll see people who years later claim that a myth
about them is true, even when it is demonstrably not
the case. And I had a question with Ellis. I
don't know how you feel, Noll, but I believe the
LSD story. I think it's true. Yeah, in fact, you
(21:38):
can hear Doc himself describe all of this in a
really cool um animated short by an outfit called No
Moss that's illustrated by a guy named James Blagden and
has audio from an interview that Ellis did in two
thousand eight on NPR with Donell, Alexander and nigli illell
(21:59):
Um and a really really cool video. And when we
play a little clip of that audio right now, I
didn't see the hitters. All I could tell was if
there was on the right side or the left side
the catch you put tape on his fingers so I
could see the signals. We had a rookie on the
team with that particular tim named Dave Cash, and he
(22:20):
kept saying after the first in it, he said, you
gotta know no going no hitter said yeah, right, yeah,
I don't know, Ben, But hearing him tell that story,
it sure sounds like, uh, somebody telling a story they
actually believe happened. Um, but it's hard to say. We
also know that he was probably not telling the truth
about the whole Timothy Leary thing, So you know, I
(22:42):
guess the jury is out, but I would like to
believe that it happened So I don't know about you,
fellow ridiculous historians, but I largely believe the bones of
this story, the structure of it. However, I have some
some pretty pertinent questions, one being the degree of alteration
that applied. If you look at the timeline of the
(23:04):
LSD was taking the way LSD works, was he taking
a larger hit, you know, was he off his cantaloupes
or was he experiencing the equivalent of what Silicon Valley
and Burning Man fans would call a micro dose? Yeah,
I mean, you know, from hearing him tell her this
was his second tab that he had taken, and in
(23:25):
those days, that stuff probably would have been pretty potent.
So I would lean more towards the what the kids
called trip and balls. So this LSD probably would have
come from a source similar to Owlsley, the legendary LSD supplier,
and the recent I'm wondering about the micro dosing is
because preliminary studies, which have only occurred quite recently UH
(23:50):
seemed to indicate that there may be some sort of
relationship between what we call the flow state and the
use of small amounts of hallucinogens just LSD. But psilocybin.
So without getting two into it, I have some I
have some pretty fascinating studies, but I'd like to hear
from you folks. Do you think that there was a
(24:12):
relationship between the L S D that doc Ellis consumed. Uh?
Did it put him in a flow state similar to
the experience people would have when they practice, uh, the
use of transcranial direct current simulation or meditation or what
have you. Or do you think it was a coincidence.
Do you think he succeeded in spite of this? You know,
(24:38):
I did here or I read uh that the that year,
the Padres were not particularly good. They had lost like
ninety thumping games in that season, so you know, it
could have just been a bad performance on their part
um that. Either way, it's it's it's pretty impressive that
a a guy could perform that well under the influence
of such a mind altering substance. Yeah, and Ellis's um.
(25:02):
Ellis's importance and his influence were not just confined to
the field of play. He was influential and important on
the US cultural stage, and other people acknowledged this right
very much. So, I mean, we talked about how he
was able to influence that decision of starting two black
pictures against one another in the ninety one All Star Game.
(25:26):
Also that year, he went on to win the World
Series with the Pirates um and one of his mentors
was a Puerto Rican player, also black, by the name
of Roberto Clemente, who was himself an outspoken opponent of
racism in baseball, and he and Ellis ended up being
(25:49):
on a version of the Pirates that had nine black players,
and it really kind of was right on this turning
point of culture where black culture became much more mainstream,
like we talked about earlier, and players on the team
talk less about this being a historic thing and just
being about the fact that everyone was fantastic baseball players.
(26:10):
So he really helped turn that conversation around to the
point where he actually got a very important letter um
from Jackie Robinson. And actually here's a clip of doc
reading a bit of this letter from that documentary called
No No, I read your comments in our paper the
last few days and one, you don't know how much
(26:30):
you appreciate your courage and honesty. In my oprainion, progress
for today's players will only come from this kind of dedication.
I'm sure also you know some of the possible consequences.
The news media, while knowing full well you're right and honest,
will use every means to get back at you. That
(26:52):
will be times when you will ask yourself is worth
it all? I can only say that it is. And
even though you will want to yield in the loan room,
your own feeling about yourself will be most important. Trying
to have to be left alone. So he goes on
to say, try to get more players to understand your
(27:12):
views and you will find great support. You have made
a real contribution. I surely hope your great ability continues.
That ability will determine the success of your dedication and honesty.
I again appreciate what you're doing. Continued success, Jackie Robinson
and you can read the full letter on various sites online.
(27:34):
Just search for Jackie Robinson and doc Ellis. This leads
us to perhaps one of the most important points of
the story, which is the following. It is very easy,
it is tempting, and it is guess fun to think
of doc Ellis solely as a guy who said I
(27:54):
started having a crazy idea and the fourth inning that
Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire I thought I
was pitching a baseball to Jimmy Hendrix and so on.
But that is a mischaracterization. We're defining an entire person
by one afternoon in their life. And as Brittany Dela
Kritaz argues in a Rolling Stone article, how Doc Ellis,
(28:18):
player who pitched a new hitter on LSD, has misremembered,
it is better, and more importantly, it is more accurate
to remember him as an outspoken advocate not just for
racial equality, but also for sobriety. Doc Ellis retired from
baseball in nineteen eighty, and he didn't have some egregious
(28:41):
injury that rendered him physically incapable of playing the game.
According to him, he lost interest in the game and
in that same year he entered rehab. He stayed for
forty days at a location in Wickenburg, Arizona, known as
the Meadows, and it wasn't until night or that he
revealed he had pitched this no hitter under the influence
(29:05):
of LSD, and once achieving sobriety, he spent the rest
of his life helping other people escape drug addiction, which
is which is commendable, you know, And he's he spent
twenty eight years doing this. Yeah, he was no joke
about it either. I mean he brought that same bravado
(29:26):
and intensity that he brought to the game um and
that he used to not take any crap from anybody
in terms of the way he dealt with racism. He
brought that same energy to helping people escape their demons
and their addictions and not um taking no for an
answer and not putting up with anyone making excuses for themselves. Yeah.
(29:50):
And he had worked as a counselor in Beverly Hills.
He had worked in jails and institutions and juvenile detention
center ers. And you know, you kind of have to wonder,
And I don't know whether there's an answer to this,
but you kind of have to wonder why, out of
the almost three decades of work he did helping people
(30:12):
achieve sobriety, he is still known for one, granted, one
amazing game, but one LSD influenced game in I don't
know what the answer is, I mean, from his own mouth.
Apparently one of his favorite phrases around the house was
f baseball Um. He apparently, according to this fantastic ESPN article,
(30:38):
felt very used up and abused by it, having started
at it at such a young age, and despite achieving
such a great success, it being a very big part
of his young adult life that possibly led to some
of these substance abuse problems to help deal with pain
that he had in his arm from the ring the
(31:00):
ball so hard all the time, from traveling around, being
constantly on the road, feeling a little uprooted and isolated.
And this is these are his own words from the documentary.
Uh So, you know, I could see how that would
be a complicated relationship. It's something that gave him much
success and accolades, but he never played a game sober.
(31:22):
He did tried to one time in nine gave it
a shot and started warming up in the bullpen, only
to realize that he had quote forgotten how to throw.
It's interesting because it ties into something that people call
state dependent learning. Have you heard of this? I have.
It's the idea that the substances influencing your body when
(31:43):
you are learning or engaging in a certain skill then
have an effect on your performance and that skill. So,
for instance, a more wholesome version of this would be, uh,
the idea that when you drink coffee and you're studying
something then you are going to be more likely to
successfully recall it when you are drinking coffee again. Right,
(32:06):
that's a very at base explanation, but it can extend
to other substances as well. Oh, I should also mention
he was he was an advocate for the treatment of
sickle cell that's right. He was able to get funding
and somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and forty
million dollars for that disease that was largely misunderstood and
(32:29):
a huge problem for the African American community. In sort
of returned to baseball when he served as a player
and coach for the St. Petersburg Pelicans of the Senior
Professional Baseball Association, but that was I think more for
the love of the game. He also had a little
stint in acting, I think, where he was in a
movie with Michael Keaton, Yeah, Gung Ho, which was directed
(32:52):
by Ron Howard. In two thousand and seven, Doc Ellis
was diagnosed with cirrhosis and was placed on the list
for a liver transplant, and he did pass away in
two thousand because unfortunately he had already sustained some damage
to his heart and it was too risky to do
a liver transplant, and yeah, you can't help it. I
(33:14):
think that that liver problems like that were the result
of a lifetime of that substance abuse. Despite having dealt
with that and been a huge beacon of hope for
others that we're dealing with those problems, that stuff does
catch up to you. It's It's absolutely true, and it's
a shame that he was not around to see No No,
(33:35):
a documentary which came out in two thousand and fourteen,
a few years after his passing. UH He was interred
at the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. And although
doc Ellis may have physically left us today, his legacy
continues on. And it's not just a story about again
(33:57):
an amazing afternoon in Bay s Ball. It's a story
about a man who struggled first two save himself, then
to improve society, and then ultimately to save others that
he met in similar situations. That's beautiful, it really is,
and we hope that you think so too. This is
(34:18):
a fun one to look into. UM cannot recommend enough
that ESPN article from Outside the Lines called the Long
Strange Trip of doc Ellis, Meet the man behind Baseball's
most psychedelic myth. You can find that online in full
by Patrick Kruby. Um. It's also got some fantastic photos
and illustrations by Joe Ciardello. UM also cannot recommend enough
(34:41):
the documentary No No a documentary. UM. You can stream
that on Amazon Prime. I think it's like a couple
of bucks and well worth it. It's money well spent
in the meantime. Although the podcast is over for today,
if you have a hankering to encounter more his story
of the Ridiculous Variety, you can find us on Instagram.
(35:03):
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. We'd especially like to recommend our community page,
Ridiculous Historians, where you can interact with your fellow listeners,
all of whom, as far as I have found, are witty,
funny and insightful. It's true memes a plenty, a lot
of fun to be had there, So check it out
(35:23):
and also do us a solid and leave us a
nice review on iTunes because it makes us feel good
in our tuppies. And stay tuned when we return very
soon in our next episode to crack the case for
a question you might not have known you had When
did Fido become a stand in name for dogs? Here boy,
here boy, while you're waiting for a dog that heard
(35:46):
that through your headphones to run towards you. We would
like to thank super producer Casey Pegram. We would like
to thank our research assistant Christopher hassi Oders. We'd like
to thank Alex Williams, friend of the show, who composed
our theme, and most importantly, we'd like to thank you
for for hanging out with us and being a lot
of fun. We'll see you next time. M
Yea quick bait and switch at the top of the show,
Ladies and Gentlemen, friends and neighbors. You may have thought
you are tuning into a podcast, but for the moment,
(00:34):
you are at a baseball game. Here the crowd, smell,
the popcorn, the hot dogs, the distant crack of a
baseball bat, the stale urine, the sale you're in, the
the beer that somehow smells both like beer and stale.
You're a sort of a Milans. Really, it all sort
of comes together. And what's the word mi asthma, my asthma,
(00:55):
A collage for the senses, a cavalcade need of experience. Hello,
my name is Ben, my name is Nolan. We love words.
We love words almost as much as we love our
super producer, Casey batter Up pegrum No. I was wondering
now that we're at this hypothetical baseball game. Uh, were
(01:19):
you much of a baseballer? Yeah? And I played the
outfield when I was like in elementary school. But I
was you know, I was a turn rested development. Yeah,
I was no good and I just looking around, you know,
just smelling the p not really being a very effective
part of the team. Wait, you were in uh stale
(01:40):
urine soaked little league. They all they all smelled like that, Ben,
from the little leagues to the minor leagues to the
major leagues, they all smell like p Well, we did
grow up. I do love that unintentional ryme. We did
grow up in different towns. I associated with the smell
of pe nuts. I was also an outfield guy, so
maybe that's what I'm peanuts. Peanuts. There we go. I'm sorry,
(02:03):
I was confused. No, no, not at all. So it's
strange because one of the most uh one of the
most beautiful series of memories that I have from growing
up is that in the early nineties you could get
very very cheap field side seats and that was my
primary informative experience with baseball until we started doing ridiculous
(02:28):
history and exploring some of the strange baseball stories, most
particularly Curse of the Colonel. But even if you haven't
played baseball, or even if you hate baseball ridiculous historians,
you have probably experienced one of the most amazing cognitive
things that humans are capable of experiencing. Dropping acid. I
(02:49):
was gonna say flow state cool. It's one of those too. Yeah,
there are many roads to the room known as the
flow state meditation in exercise LSD. And today today our
story encounters all three baseball LSD and the flow states true. Uh,
(03:14):
at least it is commonly accepted it is true. Right,
So well, could you could you set the scene? Could
you take us there? Yeah, I will take you there. Um.
It was a Friday on June twelfth of nineteen seventy, Um,
right on the tail end of you know the rule
in sixties. That's not what they were called. That was
the twenties. What were the sixties. What's a good adjective
(03:36):
for the sixties? Uh, the vibrant, the vibrant, unbridled, unhinged,
tune in, free, long, dropout, free, love, free, free, free,
all that stuff. Um. And you know a big part
of that was a guy named Timothy Leary who was
he worked at Harvard in the laboratories there, but he
(03:58):
researched with the effects of psychedelic drugs on the mind,
and he became this kind of uh Sevengali of the
sixties and of psychedelic experiences. Guru figure, that's true. And
there was another guy named Doc Ellis on that day,
June twe who was a fantastic pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates,
(04:24):
and he had just arrived at the stadium in San Diego, California,
to be the starting pitcher for a game against the
San Diego Padres. But here's the problem. He got there
just an hour and a half, ninety minutes before he's
supposed to be on the field, and he is not
(04:45):
sober because he's coming in and he had no idea
that he was supposed to play today. In fact, he
has partied to a cartoonish degree the night before, right,
he's dropped acid. He drank like a fish. Uh. And
he woke up the same day and I think it
(05:06):
was about what what about noon that he took another
hit of acid. Yeah, he was in Los Angeles, it
was his hometown. The game was in San Diego. He
thought he had a day off. He did have a
day off, but he burned through that day off, um,
as you just described. And then he woke up at
around noon after having taken another hit. Uh. And it
was a friend, a girlfriend of one of his childhood
(05:27):
friends who he was hanging out with and then crashed
over there with UM showed him the newspaper the day's newspaper,
the sports page more specifically, which said, hey, you're the
starting pitcher for this game that's about to happen today
in San Diego. So he got all this stuff together
(05:47):
right into the airport while tripping on LSD. Mind you
caught an afternoon flight and a cab directly to the stadium.
And here's the there's this great article on ESPN by
Patrick Ruby that explains it this way. And this is
according to doc Ellis himself. He landed in the San
(06:09):
Diego airport, he hopped in a cab outside, and all
he said was, Casey, can you beat me on this?
Get to the stadium? I got a pitch, Yeah, and
pitch he did. Um. You know what's funny. I'm thinking
about all this, and I'm thinking about just the stress
of going to the airport in general, and like being
on a tight timeline and being worried about missing your
(06:31):
flight or being worried about missing your appointment or whatever.
Can you imagine that with the added stress of uh,
you know, being in an altered state. Yeah. I was
thinking about this because you know, stress can be such
a personal thing, you know. I was wondering how much
would it stress him out? To me, being late for
something is more stressful than going to an airport. I
(06:53):
hate being late for stuff, But regardless of which way
you look at it, compounding that with a altered state
of consciousness, and then also compounding that with the fact
that you are a public performer. You're an athlete, right,
who's going to be performing in crowd. It's not like
you're late to your job as an archivist in a
(07:15):
basement where no one will see you for eight hours.
He was also twenty five years old, known for his
curveball and his partying days. That's that's another thing that
makes me wonder about his state of stress in this
moment was because it wasn't like this was his first bender,
not at all, not at all. And we will get
(07:35):
to that, but let's let's hear a little clip that
does a really good job of summing up how it
might have felt to be standing in that particular situation,
in that particular state of mind. There was one guy,
one guy who had an amazing claim to fame in
terms of drugs in sports. His name was Docullis, and
doc Ellis did an incredible thing. The one person who knows,
(07:57):
thank you, duc Ellis pitched a no hitter on LSD.
Those who have taken LSD tell the others how hard
that might be. If I took LSD, I'd be talking
to every blade of grass like sorry, sorry, sorry for
walk into a Major League Baseball stadium, like the whole
(08:21):
fields like okay, so your little creative license there from
Robin Williams um. But he did tip us off to
the outcome of this, this this thing that duc Ellis did.
He pitched a no hitter. Yes, and this is an
incredibly rare feat and a hundred and thirty six years
(08:42):
of baseball history, only two hundred and seventy six no
hitters have ever been recorded, and as far as we know,
this is the only one that occurred under the influence
of LSD. And it's strange because you would expect maybe
he would call out of the game, made he would
show up and have an abysmal performance, But he played
(09:06):
on acid not only well but spectacularly. He also did
walk quite a few batters, but no one hit a
ball that he threw. And additionally, no one knew that
he was on LSD, or virtually no one. It wasn't
until fourteen years later that Ellis confirmed to a reporter
at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that he had played the
(09:29):
game on acid. And the reporter, Bob Smithic, brought this
up because he was working off a tip somebody had
told them there was a rumor. Also, Ellis didn't just
say that he took acid. He said he took acid
that he received from Tim Leary, the guru himself. He
(09:52):
did say that thing. Then it's very true, um, and
it's it's a problematic story, um. For a few reasons
come from that ESPN article that we talked about earlier.
But it's called the Long Strange Trip of Doc Ellis.
But it wasn't Smizic that Doc told that particular part
of the story too. It was later when he was
inducted into something called the Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the
(10:17):
Eternals that was in Pasadena, California, and he was talking
to the executive director named Terry Cannon, who he told
that Leary, that former Harvard psych professor, had given him
the drug because he wanted to see he wanted to
test how it would affect a professional athlete. That's a
(10:39):
weird claim, though, isn't it. It's a very weird claim,
a claim that has several serious problems that are outlined
beautifully in this article. One of the big ones right
off the bat was that during this time Leary was
in fact incarcerated, and that comes from his biography Robert Greenfield. Yeah.
And then another thing is he said that he got
the acid from U c l A laboratory and also
(11:03):
people on Leary's side I don't agree. Yeah. Leary actually
has a personal archivist, a guy named Michael Horowitz, that
said this was just almost definitely focus based on, I
think probably most specifically the fact that he was in jail.
But he did say that Leary knew about the new
hitter and found out about it, and that he had
purchased Leary uh some of Doc Ellis's baseball cards, and
(11:26):
that Leary carried one around with him for the rest
of his life to show off to fans of psychedelics
and sports. Right, So if we look at the timeline here,
that makes it sound much more likely that Leary, while
a fan, learned of this experience afterwards rather than beforehand.
(11:48):
You know what I mean, I do know what you mean.
And it's it's interesting too, because Ellis had, as you said,
been a reputation that it was not only about partying,
but was it just about being kind of his own
kind of free spirit in general. He kind of did
things his own way, marched to his own drummer, and
(12:09):
you know, you get the gist. Yeah. Yeah. He described
himself as arrogant, flamboyant, and controversial. There's an article from
The Washington Post by Matt Shootel that explains some of
Ellis's erratic behavior, or at least depicts it. He was
known for throwing balls directly at batters, arguing when managers
(12:31):
and players from other teams, and he even chased Heckler's
in the stands. So you know, there are a lot
of fans of sports who will heckel the opposing teams players.
This was a guy who would come after you, oh
big time, which is crazy. And he came up in
the minors like he was like, I think eighteen years
old when he got recruited, maybe nineteen when he first
(12:52):
started playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and this was during
a time of horrible racial inequality in the United States.
He refused in many ways to fit in that stereotypical
cookie cutter image that mass media and the culture of
the time would try to force people into based on
(13:14):
what they perceived as what this person should be like
or what they were doing. One of my favorite examples
he once showed up in the Pirates bullpen wearing hair
curlers because he said that the resulting moisture on his
head would help him throw his signature and illegal spit ball, yeah,
very illegalist pitball is an illegal pitch um where the
(13:34):
picture actually changes the way the ball contacts the hand
by putting spit or some kind of like foreign substance
like petroleum jelly or in this case the sweat off
of the back of his neck. Um. But yeah, he
actually got issued a letter from the commissioner of Major
League Baseball ordering him not to wear hair curlers. Um.
(13:56):
And the thing with him was he just didn't like
being told what to do. And he might have come
off as erratic or um just willful, but he kind
of knew what he was doing. According to a lot
of his childhood friends, people that have known him his
whole life that were interviewed in a really cool movie
called No No, a documentary d O c K d
(14:17):
O c K, which is excellent and a really good
deep dive into this very divisive and interesting man's life. Um.
So in the film, another picture named Steve Blasts said
that in those days, which was the sixties, they were
playing a lot of day games, so everyone was showing
up completely hungover UM, and one way that you dealt
(14:42):
with that was by taking amphetamines. Yeah. See history today
remembers doc Ellis primarily as the guy who pitched a
no hitter while he was on LSD. But there are
a couple of things are misremembered there. One is the
(15:03):
nature of LST or acid and how high he would
have been actually, And then the second thing is that
was not the normal thing. It was much more normal
for players to be consuming amphetamines. Yeah, several players from
that era were interviewed for this film, and I think
(15:23):
the number got as high as like nine percent. These
guys are obviously, you know, um editorializing here a little bit.
There's no poll that was taken. But they were in
the game, you know, they were around these guys and
they knew what UM was done. And it wasn't like
people weren't juicing in those days. They weren't taking steroids necessarily.
They were popping Benny's and greenies or deximill right, which
(15:46):
was drug of choice. And this was kind of before
the era of widespread steroid use. So one thing we
have want to do in the exploration of this story
is established that, yeah, Doc Ellis may have been the
only person on the field on LSD, but that doesn't
(16:10):
mean he was the only person on the field on
drugs in an altered state. In an altered state, right,
because I mean the thing about you know, those kinds
of amphetamine is the kind of stuff that fighter pilots
would take, you know, during World War Two, Um Hitler
was quite fond of them. Not to equate baseball players
from the sixties with Adolf Hitler, but it was certainly
a tool of war, and sports are nothing if not
(16:33):
organized war where nobody dies. You know. That's one of
the more popular philosophical interpretations of athleticism that goes back,
you know, into ancient days, right, right, we're at the
chop heads. Although people might die of like heat stroke
or you know, uh, some sort of traumatic brain injury
over time, but typically you would not see people carried
(16:56):
off of the field of baseball in a stretcher. And
there was also a pro cannabis culture at the time, Right,
it was not uncommon for athletes to also smoke weed.
It's true, and I'm wondering, Ben, I couldn't quite find this.
But when when did it? Like if this was such
common knowledge or it just seems so obvious. I did
see a trainer saying I didn't want this in my
locker room. Don't let me see you doing it. But
(17:18):
certainly seemed quite pervasive. Um, when was it that, like
widespread drug testing became a thing in Major League baseball? Yeah,
you have to wonder if it was a result of
widespread drug test policies. Maybe players only stopped doing this
stuff when it became a fiable or find herble offense, right,
(17:40):
other than someone writing a angry letter to you. There's
also a question about how much drug use really has dwindled.
According to an article by Huffington's Post written by Andy
Martino in current and former baseball players have said as
many as twenty of Major League baseball players have used cocaine.
(18:05):
So is it a situation where there are fewer altered
states or is this situation where the type of drug
changes but drug use still exist. Yeah, I'm not quite sure.
I'm not quite sure either. But it's mystifying because as
a fairly square person myself, I would just imagine that
these all have radically different effects, right, I would think so, Ben. Um.
(18:28):
Here's the thing too about Doc ellis he you know,
we talked about the drug use, we talked about him
being a bit of a loose cannon, but he was
described by a lot of his friends in this documentary
as being uh controlled crazy. They called him controlled crazy.
He knew how to keep his wild behavior in check
and to do it just enough so that it could
(18:49):
make him money, like Dennis Robin style. Right, so there
might be some marketing there, some focused application of eccentricity
or insanity. That's right, because you have to think too.
In those days, especially during There's no Hitter, African American
pop culture had really infiltrated the mainstream, and Doc was
a flashy guy. He had fashion sense. He liked to
(19:09):
wear big, loud colors and big, you know, clinky clogs
and bell bottoms, and he was like one of the
first guys to wear an earring. Um very ahead of
his time culturally, at least in terms of baseball. Because
he actually was quoted as saying when talking about Um
the nineteen seventy one All Star Game that baseball was
(19:30):
pretty backwards when it came to black players, and there
was a controversy because he really liked to stir stuff up,
and in the press he came out and said, you
were not gonna put two brothers against each other in
this All Star Game, meaning they had already said that
they were going to start the American League team with
(19:51):
Vida Blue, who was a black pitcher, and Doc thought
that he was gonna not get to start for his
league because a guy named Sparky Anderson, a white guy, UM,
was probably gonna get that privilege. So he got the
media all stirred up and was kind of able to
bait them into getting him exactly what he wanted, and
he was He started in the All Star Game, right Yeah.
(20:12):
And it's strange because looking back and in his later
interviews when he sobered up, Ellis said that he did
not remember a lot of these activities. Not only did
he not remember a lot of the details of his
legendary no hitter run, he also said he didn't remember
(20:34):
much of nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy in general.
It's like, what is it Matt LeBlanc and Friends. He
said he couldn't remember like a whole season of that
show because he was on so many pills the whole time.
I can't imagine not remembering like a whole year, I mean, did.
It could happen for a number of reasons. I've got
a I got a few fuzzy ones. I think I'm
gonna take us down a really brief side trail here
(20:56):
that listeners from some of our other shows are familiar with.
Regardless of what sort of substances you may or may
not take throughout your life, your memory is treacherous and
works against you. But for sure because every time you're
remembering something, you're not remembering the event, you're remembering the
last time you remembered it. So you're playing a game
of telephone with yourself. That's why you will see, uh,
(21:17):
even an accounts we've presented in this show. That's why
we'll see people who years later claim that a myth
about them is true, even when it is demonstrably not
the case. And I had a question with Ellis. I
don't know how you feel, Noll, but I believe the
LSD story. I think it's true. Yeah, in fact, you
(21:38):
can hear Doc himself describe all of this in a
really cool um animated short by an outfit called No
Moss that's illustrated by a guy named James Blagden and
has audio from an interview that Ellis did in two
thousand eight on NPR with Donell, Alexander and nigli illell
(21:59):
Um and a really really cool video. And when we
play a little clip of that audio right now, I
didn't see the hitters. All I could tell was if
there was on the right side or the left side
the catch you put tape on his fingers so I
could see the signals. We had a rookie on the
team with that particular tim named Dave Cash, and he
(22:20):
kept saying after the first in it, he said, you
gotta know no going no hitter said yeah, right, yeah,
I don't know, Ben, But hearing him tell that story,
it sure sounds like, uh, somebody telling a story they
actually believe happened. Um, but it's hard to say. We
also know that he was probably not telling the truth
about the whole Timothy Leary thing, So you know, I
(22:42):
guess the jury is out, but I would like to
believe that it happened So I don't know about you,
fellow ridiculous historians, but I largely believe the bones of
this story, the structure of it. However, I have some
some pretty pertinent questions, one being the degree of alteration
that applied. If you look at the timeline of the
(23:04):
LSD was taking the way LSD works, was he taking
a larger hit, you know, was he off his cantaloupes
or was he experiencing the equivalent of what Silicon Valley
and Burning Man fans would call a micro dose? Yeah,
I mean, you know, from hearing him tell her this
was his second tab that he had taken, and in
(23:25):
those days, that stuff probably would have been pretty potent.
So I would lean more towards the what the kids
called trip and balls. So this LSD probably would have
come from a source similar to Owlsley, the legendary LSD supplier,
and the recent I'm wondering about the micro dosing is
because preliminary studies, which have only occurred quite recently UH
(23:50):
seemed to indicate that there may be some sort of
relationship between what we call the flow state and the
use of small amounts of hallucinogens just LSD. But psilocybin.
So without getting two into it, I have some I
have some pretty fascinating studies, but I'd like to hear
from you folks. Do you think that there was a
(24:12):
relationship between the L S D that doc Ellis consumed. Uh?
Did it put him in a flow state similar to
the experience people would have when they practice, uh, the
use of transcranial direct current simulation or meditation or what
have you. Or do you think it was a coincidence.
Do you think he succeeded in spite of this? You know,
(24:38):
I did here or I read uh that the that year,
the Padres were not particularly good. They had lost like
ninety thumping games in that season, so you know, it
could have just been a bad performance on their part
um that. Either way, it's it's it's pretty impressive that
a a guy could perform that well under the influence
of such a mind altering substance. Yeah, and Ellis's um.
(25:02):
Ellis's importance and his influence were not just confined to
the field of play. He was influential and important on
the US cultural stage, and other people acknowledged this right
very much. So, I mean, we talked about how he
was able to influence that decision of starting two black
pictures against one another in the ninety one All Star Game.
(25:26):
Also that year, he went on to win the World
Series with the Pirates um and one of his mentors
was a Puerto Rican player, also black, by the name
of Roberto Clemente, who was himself an outspoken opponent of
racism in baseball, and he and Ellis ended up being
(25:49):
on a version of the Pirates that had nine black players,
and it really kind of was right on this turning
point of culture where black culture became much more mainstream,
like we talked about earlier, and players on the team
talk less about this being a historic thing and just
being about the fact that everyone was fantastic baseball players.
(26:10):
So he really helped turn that conversation around to the
point where he actually got a very important letter um
from Jackie Robinson. And actually here's a clip of doc
reading a bit of this letter from that documentary called
No No, I read your comments in our paper the
last few days and one, you don't know how much
(26:30):
you appreciate your courage and honesty. In my oprainion, progress
for today's players will only come from this kind of dedication.
I'm sure also you know some of the possible consequences.
The news media, while knowing full well you're right and honest,
will use every means to get back at you. That
(26:52):
will be times when you will ask yourself is worth
it all? I can only say that it is. And
even though you will want to yield in the loan room,
your own feeling about yourself will be most important. Trying
to have to be left alone. So he goes on
to say, try to get more players to understand your
(27:12):
views and you will find great support. You have made
a real contribution. I surely hope your great ability continues.
That ability will determine the success of your dedication and honesty.
I again appreciate what you're doing. Continued success, Jackie Robinson
and you can read the full letter on various sites online.
(27:34):
Just search for Jackie Robinson and doc Ellis. This leads
us to perhaps one of the most important points of
the story, which is the following. It is very easy,
it is tempting, and it is guess fun to think
of doc Ellis solely as a guy who said I
(27:54):
started having a crazy idea and the fourth inning that
Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire I thought I
was pitching a baseball to Jimmy Hendrix and so on.
But that is a mischaracterization. We're defining an entire person
by one afternoon in their life. And as Brittany Dela
Kritaz argues in a Rolling Stone article, how Doc Ellis,
(28:18):
player who pitched a new hitter on LSD, has misremembered,
it is better, and more importantly, it is more accurate
to remember him as an outspoken advocate not just for
racial equality, but also for sobriety. Doc Ellis retired from
baseball in nineteen eighty, and he didn't have some egregious
(28:41):
injury that rendered him physically incapable of playing the game.
According to him, he lost interest in the game and
in that same year he entered rehab. He stayed for
forty days at a location in Wickenburg, Arizona, known as
the Meadows, and it wasn't until night or that he
revealed he had pitched this no hitter under the influence
(29:05):
of LSD, and once achieving sobriety, he spent the rest
of his life helping other people escape drug addiction, which
is which is commendable, you know, And he's he spent
twenty eight years doing this. Yeah, he was no joke
about it either. I mean he brought that same bravado
(29:26):
and intensity that he brought to the game um and
that he used to not take any crap from anybody
in terms of the way he dealt with racism. He
brought that same energy to helping people escape their demons
and their addictions and not um taking no for an
answer and not putting up with anyone making excuses for themselves. Yeah.
(29:50):
And he had worked as a counselor in Beverly Hills.
He had worked in jails and institutions and juvenile detention
center ers. And you know, you kind of have to wonder,
And I don't know whether there's an answer to this,
but you kind of have to wonder why, out of
the almost three decades of work he did helping people
(30:12):
achieve sobriety, he is still known for one, granted, one
amazing game, but one LSD influenced game in I don't
know what the answer is, I mean, from his own mouth.
Apparently one of his favorite phrases around the house was
f baseball Um. He apparently, according to this fantastic ESPN article,
(30:38):
felt very used up and abused by it, having started
at it at such a young age, and despite achieving
such a great success, it being a very big part
of his young adult life that possibly led to some
of these substance abuse problems to help deal with pain
that he had in his arm from the ring the
(31:00):
ball so hard all the time, from traveling around, being
constantly on the road, feeling a little uprooted and isolated.
And this is these are his own words from the documentary.
Uh So, you know, I could see how that would
be a complicated relationship. It's something that gave him much
success and accolades, but he never played a game sober.
(31:22):
He did tried to one time in nine gave it
a shot and started warming up in the bullpen, only
to realize that he had quote forgotten how to throw.
It's interesting because it ties into something that people call
state dependent learning. Have you heard of this? I have.
It's the idea that the substances influencing your body when
(31:43):
you are learning or engaging in a certain skill then
have an effect on your performance and that skill. So,
for instance, a more wholesome version of this would be, uh,
the idea that when you drink coffee and you're studying
something then you are going to be more likely to
successfully recall it when you are drinking coffee again. Right,
(32:06):
that's a very at base explanation, but it can extend
to other substances as well. Oh, I should also mention
he was he was an advocate for the treatment of
sickle cell that's right. He was able to get funding
and somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and forty
million dollars for that disease that was largely misunderstood and
(32:29):
a huge problem for the African American community. In sort
of returned to baseball when he served as a player
and coach for the St. Petersburg Pelicans of the Senior
Professional Baseball Association, but that was I think more for
the love of the game. He also had a little
stint in acting, I think, where he was in a
movie with Michael Keaton, Yeah, Gung Ho, which was directed
(32:52):
by Ron Howard. In two thousand and seven, Doc Ellis
was diagnosed with cirrhosis and was placed on the list
for a liver transplant, and he did pass away in
two thousand because unfortunately he had already sustained some damage
to his heart and it was too risky to do
a liver transplant, and yeah, you can't help it. I
(33:14):
think that that liver problems like that were the result
of a lifetime of that substance abuse. Despite having dealt
with that and been a huge beacon of hope for
others that we're dealing with those problems, that stuff does
catch up to you. It's It's absolutely true, and it's
a shame that he was not around to see No No,
(33:35):
a documentary which came out in two thousand and fourteen,
a few years after his passing. UH He was interred
at the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. And although
doc Ellis may have physically left us today, his legacy
continues on. And it's not just a story about again
(33:57):
an amazing afternoon in Bay s Ball. It's a story
about a man who struggled first two save himself, then
to improve society, and then ultimately to save others that
he met in similar situations. That's beautiful, it really is,
and we hope that you think so too. This is
(34:18):
a fun one to look into. UM cannot recommend enough
that ESPN article from Outside the Lines called the Long
Strange Trip of doc Ellis, Meet the man behind Baseball's
most psychedelic myth. You can find that online in full
by Patrick Kruby. Um. It's also got some fantastic photos
and illustrations by Joe Ciardello. UM also cannot recommend enough
(34:41):
the documentary No No a documentary. UM. You can stream
that on Amazon Prime. I think it's like a couple
of bucks and well worth it. It's money well spent
in the meantime. Although the podcast is over for today,
if you have a hankering to encounter more his story
of the Ridiculous Variety, you can find us on Instagram.
(35:03):
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. We'd especially like to recommend our community page,
Ridiculous Historians, where you can interact with your fellow listeners,
all of whom, as far as I have found, are witty,
funny and insightful. It's true memes a plenty, a lot
of fun to be had there, So check it out
(35:23):
and also do us a solid and leave us a
nice review on iTunes because it makes us feel good
in our tuppies. And stay tuned when we return very
soon in our next episode to crack the case for
a question you might not have known you had When
did Fido become a stand in name for dogs? Here boy,
here boy, while you're waiting for a dog that heard
(35:46):
that through your headphones to run towards you. We would
like to thank super producer Casey Pegram. We would like
to thank our research assistant Christopher hassi Oders. We'd like
to thank Alex Williams, friend of the show, who composed
our theme, and most importantly, we'd like to thank you
for for hanging out with us and being a lot
of fun. We'll see you next time. M
Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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