Psychedelics and Athletics: What we got wrong about Dock Ellis’s LSD No-Hitter

June 12, 1970. San Diego. 

A 25-year-old Dock Phillip Ellis Jr strides to the mound and takes the ball for what would become his most infamous performance of a twelve-year career that included an All-Star game start, five trips to the postseason, and a World Series ring. Nobody, including Dock himself, would have expected that when the game ended, Dock would have completed the entire contest without allowing one single hit. 

The performance, one of just 326 no-hitters in over 470,000 opportunities throughout major league baseball history, would have already been a noteworthy accomplishment. But a small detail came out a few years after Dock retired that elevated the feat to a league all its own: Dock revealed to a reporter that he had taken multiple doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly called LSD or acid) prior to the start. 

Now, Dock, self-admittedly, had a substance abuse problem. Until he revealed the LSD usage in that post-retirement interview, he had told people that his no-hitter had come while under the influence of alcohol and amphetamines, which made sense to those who knew him. According to Dock, he had never pitched while sober, but the no-hitter in San Diego had been the only time that acid came into play. In fact, Dock’s no-hitter remains the only time that a professional athlete has used (or admitted to using, at least) LSD on the field. Which begs the question: “If the only time that LSD was used on the field, one of the most impressive feats possible occurred, is there not some type of correlation between the two?”

I have some firsthand experience with both pitching and LSD, but never at the same time. I competed on the mound and understand the combination of physical prowess, mental fortitude, and competitive fire that it requires to be successful as a pitcher. I also have used LSD a few dozen times over the past decade, and I feel like I’ve begun to get an understanding of how it affects the mind. 

A simple search for the effects of LSD will say that it affects the brain by altering the way the user perceives the world, enhancing creativity and causing hallucinations. But until someone experiences it for themselves, that description is far too simple to be effective. What LSD really does is allows extreme focus in the areas that one is directing it. The hallucinations are not truly manifestations of the mind, but rather an over exaggeration of what is normally perceivable in regular consciousness. It makes details explode, and heightens our perceptions to new levels. In my experience, details such as the cells in leaves, the grain in wood, and small body language cues have come to my attention in a way that had never been made apparent without LSD. But the first handful of times I had used psychedelics, these perceptions had not been apparent to me as insightful. It was only once I had used LSD a handful of times that I started to put together the ways that acid had allowed me to see my experiences with a different lens and enhance my understanding of the world around me. Until I started to recognize the value I was gaining during my trips, my LSD usage had been an unspoken recreational experience. 

So, with that in mind, I can understand why Dock shied away from telling people about his LSD usage. In his mind, just as it was in mine for a while, LSD was just another drug that contributed to his problem. It had not yet revealed itself as a substance that enhanced his ability to perform, not hindered it. He was only focused on the changed perception, not what he was gaining from the changed perception. But with the way that LSD was sure to help Dock better understand the swing paths and body language of batters, feel the seams and spin of the baseball with more detail, and think through pitch sequencing with more creativity, it's possible that Dock shied away from unearthing one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in modern athletics: the ability of psychedelic drugs to help athletes hone in on the mental side of their craft in a previously unattainable way. 

LSD has been studied in recent years for the ability to help people with mental health diagnoses to overcome them, and is continuously inching closer to legalization for those types of transformational experiences. But I believe that in due time, we as a society will recognize the potential the substance possesses to allow us to reach our full potential, as Dock did that one June day. 

Personally, I have used LSD to help me better hone my craft in the weight room, allowing me to achieve levels of proprioception that would have been unattainable otherwise. I even completed my most taxing athletic feat to date—a 46-mile ultramarathon through the hot, humid Florida summer—after ingesting a tab of acid, as I believed that the drug would allow me to dial in on my body’s feeling and sensations, and allow me to reach the finish line. There's no way for me to know if I would have completed the race otherwise, but I do know that I fought through 46 miles of pain, cramps and exhaustion to complete a race three times longer than any distance I had attempted previously. I avoided injury and surprised myself with just how far I was able to push. 

I’m hoping that by documenting my experience with psychedelics, describing what I believe I am gaining from their usage, and reexamining feats like Dock’s no-hitter, that it begins to open up the discussion about what may be possible with psychedelics. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see just how high we can fly. 

But it all starts with the question “What if?” 

What if what we’ve been telling ourselves about psychedelic drugs has been wrong for the last half-century? What if there is a level within all of ourselves that psychedelics can help to unlock? What if Dock threw his no-hitter, not despite being on LSD, but because of it? 

What if?