Balls Out

Ellis had just had his first experience with amphetamines; by the time he arrived on the Pirates proper, Ellis was popping green Dexamyl pills before every game. Eventually, he'd need between 70 and 85 milligrams to get up for a start; that would be somewhere between five and 12 pills, depending on what type he took. And over the next 12 years, he wouldn't pitch a single major league game without them. Not one.

"Doctors aren't gonna come out and say it, but it enhances your game," Ellis says. "The thing is, you get addicted to it. You take half a pill and do great. Then you take half three weeks later and don't do good, so you say maybe I better take the other half. 'Cause I'm not feeling the same way. It got to the point where I had to take it just to be on the bench, when I'm not pitching. Just to stay awake.

"Why? Fear. Fear of success and fear of failure."

By his final year, 1979, there wasn't much cause for Ellis to fear success. He bounced from the Rangers to the Mets, compiled a 4-12 record with a 5.98 ERA and made one last request to Pittsburgh General Manager "Pete" Peterson: Trade me or let me die a Pirate. He was granted his request and made three relief appearances with the Bucs. When Corbett sold the Rangers before the 1980 season, Ellis made it official and retired. By that point, he didn't care about baseball at all. All he cared about was getting high. Speed, cocaine, even scotch. Which he hated.

"Then my son was born," Ellis says. "I was wearing a lot of jewelry at the time, and when I'd hold him, I'd grab his arms and whatnot. Then I read these stories about parents who shake their kids and kill them. I asked myself, I wonder how hard I'm grabbing him. Then I realized the truly fucked-up thing: that I had to ask myself at all. That's when I knew, something's wrong with me. I went to treatment the next day.

"I was in there sniffing pingpong balls, trying to get high. A doctor came to me and asked me to list all the substances I'd done in my life. He looked at the paper and said, 'I have to classify you as suicidal.' I said fuck you. Suicidal. He handed me back the paper and said, 'Anyone who's doing that is trying to kill themselves.' I looked at him and thought about that. After a minute, I told him nobody will ever have to worry about me getting high ever again."

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This is the point of the story at which things are supposed to get ugly. There should be backsliding, stories of long sweaty nights with "friends" whose last names you don't know, possibly a homeless period or two.

None of it happened to Ellis. After he quit baseball and cleaned up, he's had basically no contact with the game--he played a couple of seasons in a senior league and was briefly hired by George Steinbrenner ("the only person in baseball who wasn't afraid I'd be the old Dock Ellis") as a minor league drug counselor--but mostly he's been eating Snickers and drinking Dr Pepper, working as a drug counselor. He seems to genuinely miss the game, especially the fans, but he doesn't seem devastated by it.

"You know, I'm just clean and sober and going on about my business," he says. "But there's gotta be a place for me in baseball. I should be with baseball. But that's partly my fault. I alienated myself. I left baseball with the wrong impression about the people who ran the game. 'Cause I had that paranoia that everybody was out to get me."

"It's almost like Dock wanted people to think he wasn't as smart as he is," Dave Parker says. "But the people he's close to, we know."

One day last month, Ellis walked into the Victor Valley penitentiary, where, for the past two years, he's worked as a drug counselor. He said he had a surprise for his class. HBO Sports was doing a piece on him, and they'd dug up an old black-and-white videotape of that June 1970 game against the Pirates. To that point, Ellis swore that no tape of the game existed, and he'd never seen himself pitch high on LSD. And this would be the first time he was watching it. As the game enters the ninth, it gets to two outs, three balls and two strikes, and then the tape cuts straight to a postgame interview.

"I remember getting that last out," Ellis says. "And turning around and saying, 'A fucking no-hitter!' It didn't really hit me until the next morning, when I was less high, and I got a live phone call from CBS or ABC or something wanting to interview me. They kept telling me to turn the TV down. Too much feedback."