“I would try to out-milligram any opponent,” he said.įriends in South Los Angeles remember Ellis being flashy, funny and prone to getting into trouble, though the film doesn’t mention his arrest for grand theft just before the Pirates signed him, with the young pitcher released into the team’s custody. For his part, Ellis said he would take as many as 17 pills before a game. The film helpfully includes other major leagues who note that almost every player was on greenies at the time. His drug of choice was “greenies” or amphetamines, and he liked it when batters considered him generally unhinged. Teammates including Steve Blass and Al Oliver call Ellis a good influence in the clubhouse, but Blass wishes Ellis hadn’t pulled the curlers stunt on a day game when players were hungover and trying to avoid their manager.Įllis said he never played a game in the Major Leagues in which he wasn’t high, a condition he attributed to fear of failure and his need, as a pitcher, to intimidate the opposition. Using icons of the era – jokes by Robin Williams and Johnny Carson, the latter noting Ellis’ best pitches as “a fastball, a slider and a spit-curl,” as well as a Black Panthers training film – the docu makes its case that baseball and culture were colliding, and Ellis was at the center of that impact. Starting with footage of Ellis on the mound during his no-hitter, the docu soon segues to his next most memorable dust-up with baseball authorities, when he wore his hair in curlers to practice at Wrigley Field. History buffs, particularly those of the era, will want a seat in the ballpark for Pittsburgh fans, this is a collectible. While the film’s sense of chronology is at times strained and its tale of redemption hardly unique, its subject is certainly one of a kind. In between, Radice pitches Ellis as part Jackie Robinson, part Muhammad Ali, part Timothy Leary, while stopping to pay homage to the 1971 Pirates, who took baseball integration to its color-blind limit, and won a World Series. In first-time director Jeffrey Radice’s “No No: A Dockumentary,” the story of Dock Ellis, who famously threw a no-hitter on LSD for the Pittsburgh Pirates, begins as a celebration of the wild times that were the early ’70s, and ends with the reckoning of the years that came after he left baseball.
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