It may be the accomplishment of which he was proudest.
He had pitched a no-hitter on LSD.
Not even his teammates knew.
On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates
no-hit the Padres in San Diego
on the best acid trip of the several he had taken.
He had to keep it secret, although he confided the secret
to Donald Hall, the American poet, for a biography he wrote
and published in 1976. But they had to take it out of the manuscript because
Ellis was signed by the Yankees, whose owner,
the imperious George Steinbrenner, had little patience
for this sort of thing. But word leaked out, "trickling quietly
into the zeitgeist of a pre-internet world," as The Guardian put it
on the fiftieth anniversary of the feat. O journalism!
How great is thy tribute to the anniversaries of the world!