“I really didn’t see the hitters,” Ellis would admit years later. “All I could tell is if they were on the right side or the left side. The catcher had tape on his fingers to help me see signals. But I was high as a Georgia pine.”

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When he woke late that morning, he tried putting the details together from the night before, but in those days, for Dock Ellis, that wasn’t always easy. He knew the Pirates had landed in San Diego early Wednesday night after playing a noon game at Candlestick. He had permission from his manager, Danny Murtaugh, to drive to L.A., his hometown.
The rest … that was a little blurry. Anyway, he was eager to enjoy a full day off before getting back to the grind.
He looked around the house to see if his host had anything … interesting; it was 1970.
Of course she did. It was just before noon when he crushed the LSD tab, snorted it, waited for the show to kick in. “What are you doing?!” his host exclaimed. “You have to pitch tonight!” “Nah,” Ellis told her. “I don’t pitch till Friday.” “It is Friday!” she said, opening the newspaper to the sports section and, sure enough, there was his name. Now he was really confused.
“What happened to Thursday?” he asked.
Fifty years ago, on June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis’ friend rushed him to LAX so he could make a 3:30 flight back to San Diego, floating him the $9.50 fee for the hourly shuttle. He arrived at San Diego Stadium at 4:30. First pitch was scheduled for 6:05, first game of a twi-night doubleheader.
He then authored what is surely among the most bizarre chapters in baseball history.
He would walk eight Padres, hit another. He would throw around 150 pitches;
Bob Moose, who was supposed to chart for him, gave up after a while because he was all over the place. Willie Stargell hit a couple of solo home runs.
And at 8:18 p.m., in front of fewer than 10,000 fans in that cavernous park, Ellis threw strike three past Ed Spiezio to complete one of the most unlikely no-hitters baseball has ever seen.
(It also is part of one of the great trivia questions — name the five pitchers who played for both the Yankees and Mets who threw no-hitters for teams OTHER than the Yankees and Mets. Answer below. You have a one-player head start.)
“I don’t think any of us in the Padres dugout had any clue he was throwing a no-hitter because we had runners on every inning,” says Dave Campbell, the former ESPN announcer who led off for the Padres that night.
Ellis was 25, making just his 57th career start, but the league already knew him as a force. “I’ve always been asked who the toughest guy I ever faced was,” Campbell says, “and I always say Dock. His fastball had such great late movement, always seemed to be in one place when I’d start my swing and then move in another direction. It could sink, move in on my hands, or sail away like Mariano Rivera’s cutter.”