Dock Ellis and The LSD No-Hitter
Dock Ellis made baseball history on June 12, 1970, when he threw a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the San Diego Padres while under the influence of LSD. One of the most surreal and controversial moments in Major League Baseball, the game has since become a legendary story of altered perception, raw talent, and chaos. Ellis took acid the day before, believing he wasn’t scheduled to pitch. By the time he realized his mistake, he had only hours to travel from Los Angeles to San Diego. Still tripping, he took the mound, walked eight batters, struck out six, and recorded 27 outs without allowing a hit.
LSD No-No Pre Game
On June 11, 1970, the Pittsburgh Pirates landed in San Diego for the start of a West Coast road trip. Dock Ellis had the day off, so he went to visit friends in Los Angeles. Thinking he wasn’t scheduled to pitch until later in the series, the old friends caught up over heroic amounts booze, marijuana and LSD until Ellis drifted off to sleep. He dropped more acid after waking from what he thought was a catnap, believing it still to be Thursday. That’s when his friend entered the room with a newspaper in hand and an unmistakable look of concern: not only were the Pirates scheduled to play a doubleheader that day, but Ellis was scheduled to pitch. In four hours, in an entirely different city. Ellis’ immediate reaction, as he recalled it: “What happened to yesterday?”
He arrived at the home of a friend’s girlfriend. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked upon his arrival.
“I’m as high as a Georgia pine,” Ellis said.
The time was 2pm. Ellis hopped a taxi to the airport and bought a $9.50 ticket for a 3.30pm flight to San Diego, arriving an hour later and making it to the ballpark in time for the 6.05pm first pitch.
He was still tripping hard.
Pitching on LSD
Dock Ellis stepped onto the mound floating in a state of chemical chaos. The ball in his hand shifted shape—at times it pulsed like a balloon, then shrank like a marble. The batter blurred in and out. He was convinced the man at the plate was Jimi Hendrix, winding up with a guitar instead of a bat. The home plate umpire? At one point, Ellis swore it was Richard Nixon, judging every pitch with presidential authority. The stadium lights shimmered. The crowd sounded like static. He was in another dimension.
“I can only remember bits and pieces of the game,” Ellis recalled in 1984. “I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the [catcher’s] glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters, and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t.
“Sometimes, I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. 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.”
"At one point, Ellis swore it was Richard Nixon, judging every pitch with presidential authority."
He relied on his catcher, Jerry May, who, knowing something was off, taped his fingers in white to give Ellis a visual anchor. Even then, Ellis struggled to track the target. Sometimes he saw May. Sometimes he didn't. He walked the first two batters and loaded the bases twice in the first few innings. He remembers chewing his gum so frantically that it dissolved into dust in his mouth. He would lock in for moments, deliver a pitch, then lose himself again.
"The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes, I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. 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.”
In some ways, Ellis’s performance for the Pirates against San Diego Padres on Friday 12 June 1970 was not exactly a pitching masterclass. Ellis recorded more walks (eight) than strikeouts (six), hit another batsman, allowed three stolen bases, and was bailed out by highlight-reel plays in the field by second baseman Bill Mazeroski and centerfielder Matty Alou. But consider the circumstances: “I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire,” he recounted years later to the New York Times. “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."
He threw balls that veered unpredictably, some hitting batters. Others found the strike zone in spite of him. On one play, he flinched and leapt into the air, convinced a ball was screaming toward him, a grounder that barely trickled past the mound. His perception twisted and unraveled constantly. At one point, he tried to throw while locking eyes with the hitter, convinced he could beat them with sheer force of will.
“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."
But something strange happened. Every time the game nearly slipped away, someone behind him stepped up. Matty Alou chased down a deep fly in center. Bill Mazeroski snagged a line drive that could’ve scored two. Willie Stargell tracked a foul ball into the stands. Pirates fielders were on high alert, playing like they knew their pitcher was on a tightrope walk through a hallucination.
Ellis said he could only remember glimpses of innings. But in those fragments, something supernatural settled in. He threw 131 pitches, walked eight, struck out six, and gave up no hits. He faced 36 batters and somehow, impossibly, retired 27 of them without letting a single one reach safely on a hit.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t smooth. But it was something no one had ever done before or since. A no-hitter on acid.
Post Game LSD No Hitter Aftermath
In the days immediately following the game, Dock Ellis didn’t talk publicly about what had really happened. He went through the usual postgame motions. The press called it wild, called it erratic, called it unlikely—but still historic. His teammates didn’t know. His coaches didn’t know.
Years later, Ellis admitted the truth weighed on him. He called the no-hitter both the highlight of his career and a painful blur. He didn’t remember what pitches he threw. He didn’t remember the full arc of the game. He didn’t even remember the final out. “I was gone,” he once said. “I wasn’t even in the stadium mentally.” The regret didn’t stem from the danger. It came from the idea that he had stolen something from himself. He had pitched the game of his life and didn’t get to experience it.
“I wasn’t even in the stadium mentally.”
The LSD no-hitter stayed a secret until 1984. That’s when Ellis, no longer pitching and beginning to speak publicly about his addictions, revealed the story to a reporter. It didn’t explode instantly. It floated around as an urban legend. Some players believed it instantly. Cesar Cedeño, who knew Ellis well, didn’t question it for a second. Many in the media dismissed it as an exaggeration. The lack of consistent coverage, and the fact that Ellis had kept quiet for over a decade, left room for doubt.
Ellis eventually admitted that during his career, he pitched under the influence nearly every game. Not always acid. Most of the time it was alcohol, speed, or both. Uppers were common in clubhouses then. Players called them “greenies.” They weren’t considered cheating. They were considered survival.
By then, Ellis had begun the long, painful process of recovery. His playing days were over. He had seen the damage drugs had done to others and to himself. He got clean. He studied addiction. And he committed himself to helping people get sober—not just players, but anyone trying to claw their way out of the same hole. He worked in rehab clinics. He led group sessions in prisons. He showed up for people the way no one had really shown up for him when he was playing.
And yet, the LSD no-no followed him. It became his legacy whether he wanted it or not. It resurfaced again in the early 2000s, when a psychedelic animated short retelling the game, narrated by Ellis in his own words. It found a new audience online and reintroduced Ellis to a generation who had never seen him pitch.
That led to No No: A Dockumentary, a deeper look at his life beyond the acid myth. The film peeled back the performance to show the man: an outspoken advocate for Black athletes, a challenger of baseball’s unwritten rules, a survivor of the 1970s clubhouse culture, and later, a mentor to the broken and addicted. One of the most powerful moments in the film comes when Ellis reads aloud a letter sent to him by Jackie Robinson, a gesture of solidarity, urging him to stay strong in a sport that hadn’t yet fully welcomed players who looked or talked like him.
In 1971, Ellis started the All-Star Game and was an important member of the Pittsburgh team that defeated the vaunted Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. He joined the Yankees toward the end of his career and was a key starter on a New York team that captured the pennant in 1976, winning the American League’s Comeback Player of the Year award.
Ellis’ psychedelic feat has come to overshadow both the on-field accomplishments and social conscience that marked his 12-year major-league career. When he’d first signed a contract with the Pirates out of high school, it had been less than two decades since Major League Baseball was integrated. The free-thinking Ellis was unafraid to voice his opinions on social injustice and institutionalized racism in a sport that was slow to integrate.
Back in 2006, the two men collaborated on a Frank magazine feature, titled “An Illustrated History of Recreational Drug Use in Sports,” a hall of shame that included the exploits of Lawrence Taylor and Steve Howe. Readers responded particularly to Blagden’s trippy depiction of Ellis (click on above image), and the duo were eager to turn his tale into an animated short. “Of all those stories, his kind of captured the imagination in an exciting way that some of the other, more tragic, stories maybe didn’t,” says Blagden.
In 2008, Ellis sat down with NPR’s Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel for a final interview. The animator James Blagden went on to use the audio as voice-over narration for an award-winning short film that posthumously elevated Ellis’ peak
Dock Ellis died in 2008 from liver failure. He spent the last decades of his life trying to repair the damage he had once done. But no matter how far he traveled in recovery, the world never forgot what happened that day in 1970.
The 2nd LSD Attempt
After his 1970 acid-laced no-hitter, Dock Ellis didn’t immediately go public with what had happened. But the impact of that day stuck with him—mentally, emotionally, chemically. Somewhere in that haze, he started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, there was something to it. Something repeatable.
There’s no full box score or stat line attached to a “second LSD game,” but Ellis later suggested in interviews that he experimented again with acid during a game. It wasn’t documented the same way. No historic outcome. No miracle defense. What Ellis remembered was the chaos. No control. No rhythm. He couldn’t find the plate. His pitches weren’t dancing—they were flying wild. The idea that the drug gave him superpowers was a delusion.
This second attempt—if it truly happened—looked nothing like the first. No no-hitter. No magic. Just a pitcher unraveling in real time. He abandoned the experiment, never again trying LSD on the mound. The myth began and ended with that one day in San Diego.
Years later, in a Jet magazine interview from 1984, Ellis gave a different kind of story—no acid, no hallucinations, just violence. This time the setting was June 12, 1974, exactly four years after the no-hitter. It was a game against the Cincinnati Reds. Not a coincidence.
The Reds were his most hated opponent. Cincinnati had become a personal war zone. Two years earlier, a security guard at Riverfront Stadium had maced him in the face for failing to produce ID—despite being one of the most recognizable players in the league. He said he was racially profiled, humiliated. Joe Morgan had accused him of doctoring baseballs. Ellis saw the Reds as arrogant and unaccountable.
So he made a decision. On the morning of the game, he told his teammates: “I’m going to hit every one of them motherfuckers.” He wasn’t joking. It was premeditated.
He walked out to the mound with only one goal. He hit Pete Rose in the ribs with the first pitch. Then Joe Morgan. Then Dan Driessen. Three batters, three hit-by-pitches. Johnny Bench ducked. Tony Pérez knew what was coming. Manager Danny Murtaugh sprinted from the dugout to pull him. He was yanked mid-inning, escorted off the field without recording an out.
Later, Ellis claimed he had hoped to “wake the team up.” The Pirates were slumping. He thought shock therapy might reset the energy. In truth, it was revenge. It was control. It was what rage looked like when it came with a 90 mph fastball.
That incident got attention. But unlike the no-hitter, it didn’t become legend. It was written off as Dock being Dock—volatile, unpredictable, combative. The story wasn’t hidden. It just wasn’t celebrated. It was closer to a meltdown than a miracle.
Ellis eventually admitted that during his career, he pitched under the influence nearly every game. Not always acid. Most of the time it was alcohol, speed, or both. Uppers were common in clubhouses then. Players called them “greenies.” They weren’t considered cheating. They were considered survival.
But the acid? That was different. He never touched it again during a game. Not after the failed second trip. Whatever illusion of control he thought he had was shattered. He had walked into the abyss once and somehow come out clean. The second time, the abyss reached back.
The difference between the two games—one remembered as a surreal triumph, the other barely remembered at all—is the line between myth and mess. That’s Dock Ellis. That’s what made his story real. Not the drug. Not the drama. The fact that underneath all of it was a man trying to navigate a career, a rivalry, and a self-destructive streak he couldn’t yet outrun.
