Louis Black is co-founder and editor of the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle and a founder of the South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals. Louis was an original board member of the Austin Film Society and a past president of that organization. Louis was Executive Producer of ‘Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Zandt‘ and Associate Producer of ‘The Order of Myths‘.

Glen E. Friedman is a world-renowned photographer, artist, and music & film producer who formed a close friendship with Dock Ellis as a boy. Glen’s youth was spent skateboarding in the West Los Angeles area “Dogtown”, and he was both Co-Producer and Creative Consultant for the film ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys‘, which won a 2002 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary, and the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.

Keith Maitland is the director of the feature-length documentary, ‘The Eyes of Me‘, which premiered at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, and on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2010. Keith participated in the Director’s Guild of America Trainee Program, and upon completion of the program, became one of the youngest members of the DGA, working alongside directors including Woody Allen, Janusz Kaminski, and Joel Schumacher and on NBC’s ‘Law & Order’.

Ray Shapley is a successful businessman and entrepreneur with a broad range of experience in technology sales and marketing. Ray has served as a trusted advisor to the producers for years. He will provide invaluable expertise to help design an effective social marketing and online advertising campaign to reach potential stakeholders and supporters and develop an audience for the film during the production process. Ray also played baseball at The University of Kansas.

Scipio Spinks is a former Major League Baseball pitcher for the Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals, and he was a contemporary and close friend of our film’s subject, Dock Ellis. Scipio is currently a scout for the Houston Astros and has previously coached at two Historically Black Colleges, Jackson State and Texas Southern. Scipio has made it a personal focus to reverse the declining participation since the 1970s of young African-Americans in baseball.

The original article can be found here.

The Muhammad Ali of Baseball

A game on LSD brought Dock Ellis the fame he deserved – for totally different reasons

By Wolfgang Hettfleisch

(Translation: Ursula C. Sturm, www.translations-that-click.de)

It was an unfortunate twist of events for Dock Ellis. The pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, an MLB team, had used a break in the series versus the San Diego Padres to visit friends in Los Angeles. Enough time, he thought, to have a couple of drinks and joints and then consume some LSD and get high. Unfortunately, the Pirates pitcher sort of lost a day due to his LSD-induced stupor and was still on his trip, when his friends opened the newspaper and found out that he was supposed to play in a couple of hours. The effect of LSD, the most popular drug of the Hippie movement, can last for hours and hours. Ellis had no chance of coming down in time for the game.

The rest of that day 40 years ago was only a vague memory for him. Before the game started, he took some stimulants. Amphetamines were consumed like M&M’s in MLB at that time. Ellis could barely make out the opposing hitter. He only saw the fingers of his catcher, taped with fluorescent tape. The size of the baseball seemed to be as big as a pumpkin one minute and tiny like a golf ball the next. The score never registered with him. The result was a so-called no-hitter, a game where not a single valid hit is achieved by the opposing team. Things cannot get much better than that.

June 12th 1970 did not earn Dock Ellis a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but it did make him famous throughout the USA, even though that came much later. The writer and later poet laureate Donald Hall wrote a biography about Dock Ellis, the “different kind of baseball star”, as early as 1976. Before the book came out as a paperback in 1989, the original version, which stated that Ellis had been drunk that day in San Diego, was changed to what actually happened. Ever since, Dock Ellis, who died one and a half years ago, and his no-hitter on LSD have become baseball folklore in America.

Donald Hall & Dock Ellis (1976)

Poets and bands have taken up the topic, and countless differing and thoroughly embellished accounts circulate on the internet. But these can easily put people on the wrong track, says Jeffrey Radice from Austin, Texas, who is planning to shoot a documentary on Dock Phillip Ellis Junior. Said documentary presents Ellis as a clever, courageous and, most of all, honest man who fought against the baseball establishment, thus becoming a forerunner for a new, proud generation of popular African-American sports stars in the USA.

Dock Ellis constituted what was later called an “Enfant terrible”. Donald Hall called him the Muhammad Ali of Baseball. The man who stated about himself that he never played a single Major League game without being high, was a child of his times. He loved Jimi Hendrix and eccentric outfits. Once he even came to training with curlers in his hair because someone had complained about his hairstyle. And when spectators insulted him with racist comments, he would sometimes climb into the stands to kindly inquire what the problem was and whether it could possibly be solved over a shared dinner.

“He wasn’t perfect, he may not have been particularly noble, but he was human”, says Jeff Radice. This was enough to make the headstrong jock an outsider in professional baseball in the 1970s. Plus he was African-American. The Major Leagues had only been opened for African-American players in the 1940s, when racial segregation in US baseball was abolished and the Negro Leagues, where African-Americans played amongst themselves, were dissolved.

Ellis, who saw himself in the tradition of the civil-rights movement, became an icon for a new, self-confident generation of African-American athletes. Many ambitious African-American athletes decided to play baseball. This trend has long since changed. Today, Latino players dominate the MLB, while most African-American talents decide to play basketball or American football. With his film project “Dockumentary”, Jeff Radice therefore wants to examine a chapter in US sports history which is increasingly falling into oblivion. He quotes Jacques Barzun, a French-American cultural historian, who stated, “To understand America you must first understand baseball.”

Dock Ellis continues to be misunderstood. After his short and sensational career, which brought him a championship with the Pittsburg Pirates and a start in the All-Star Game, he retired in the late 1970s. After that, baseball no longer played a role in his life. He managed to overcome his addictions, became a drug counselor, and spoke openly about a fact that nobody in MLB wanted to hear: that the majority of the players of his time were on something – pretty much anything that would enhance their performance. The steroid scandal involving stars like Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds indicates that the preferred substances may have changed, but the principle has not. Dock Ellis, the flamboyant Ali of Baseball, died in December 2008 at the age of 63 as a result of a cirrhosis of the liver.

Muhammad Ali of Boxing

We’re hosting a celebration in honor of the 40th anniversary of Dock Ellis’ famed no-hitter on LSD. It will take place at The Highball in Austin from 6-10 PM Saturday June 12th, 2010.

The event is sponsored by Planet K and the Austin Film Society and is benefiting the Center for Independent Documentary, which is our non-profit fiscal sponsor for the film.

Music will be provided by Flounders Without Eyes and Le Freak (a side project of Afrofreque).

We will premiere a fundraising trailer video for the film ‘No No: A Dockumentary’. We also plan to share some live footage captured of Todd Snider in concert at the Texas Union Ballroom in January 2010. A secret special short “unnamed” clip of Dock Ellis talking about drugs (circa 2005) will round out the program.

Suggested donation for the event is $15, and the first 50 people through the door will receive a free copy of the commemorative poster pictured here (image designed by Lil Tuffy, printed by Obsolete Industries).

The Highball is located at 1142 South Lamar (same shopping center as the Alamo Drafthouse South).

On Facebook you can RSVP here http://www.facebook.com/dockumentary

Or via Do512

We hope to see you there!

Jeffrey Radice (Director) -- Scipio Spinks -- Mike Blizzard (Producer)

Scipio Spinks is awesome, and he was really fun to interview. As Scipio stated when we first reached out to him, he and Dock were “intimate friends”, and it is now clear why. In addition to being black pitchers in the National League around the same age in the early 1970s, they just seem to have similar personalities. Although we never had the pleasure to hang with Dock, Scipio is clearly cut from the same cloth — cool, friendly, dynamic, charismatic, intelligent … would love to have been a fly on the wall back in 1972 – 1973 when they got together.

It is also clear that Scipio deeply loves the game of baseball, and that he is genuinely concerned about where it fits into the lives of young black men today. Within the African-American community, there has been a generational shift away from baseball since the 1970s. For men like Scipio and Dave Winfield who grew up in awe of greats like Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson, and the racial battles they fought, to see those legacies fade in such a short period of time has to be disconcerting. It is a shame that a rare genuine athletic role model such as Curt Flood can be so easily forgotten by the entitled millionaire athletes his selfless actions most benefited.

Scipio personally had a profound impact on one of the greats of the game today –
Torii Hunter.

I was a football player as a kid. Football was my life where I grew up. But people like Scipio Spinks, who pitched in the Major Leagues and saw me play, and my grandfather were able to convince me that I could have a long career in baseball and not tear up my body. I am grateful I listened to them and followed this path. Now I’m dedicated to spreading the word to other young kids.

We’re going to hold back on what Scipio had to say about Dock for now, but we asked Scipio about his relationship with Torii Hunter and it is shared below.

Direct link to the Video on Vimeo

The boxscore for the game tells just part of the story. As with many tales from the annals of Dock Ellis, this one is overloaded with insights into the game of baseball, and the art of pitching & plunking — and also as usual with Dock, when we scratch beneath the surface the back story becomes just as fascinating as the incident itself.

In 1976 Donald Hall provided some background in Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball:

Four days earlier, I had seen him at a party in Pittsburgh. I wandered around, talking to various people. Dock’s attorney and friend Tom Reich was there, shaking his head in disapproval of a plan of Dock’s. I met Dock in the kitchen fixing a drink. I asked him with some awe, “Are you really going to hit every Cincinnati ballplayer Wednesday night?”

He returned the awe. “How you know that?” he said.

In 2006 Bob Smizik of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette spoke with Dock, who elaborated that the seeds for this were sown at least as far back as 1974 spring training:

“They called our team dumb,” said Ellis of the Reds. “I told Kurt Bevacqua in spring training I would drill all of them.

“Bevacqua said, ‘I’ll bet you a Chateaubriand.’

“I collected.”

More from Donald Hall, quoting the reasons Dock gave for his plan:

“Cincinnati will bullshit with us and kick our ass and laugh at us. They’re the only team that talk about us like a dog. Whenever we play that team, everybody socializes with them.” In the past the roles had been reversed. “When they ran over to us, we knew they were afraid of us. When I saw our team doing it, right then I say, `We gonna get down. We gonna do the do. I’m going to hit these motherfuckers.’ ”

Donald Hall poetically described the game action:

“The first pitch to Pete Rose was directly toward his head,” as Dock expresses it, “not actually to hit him, ” but as “the message, to let him know that he was going to get hit. More or less to press his lips. I knew if I could get close to the head that I could get them in the body. Because they’re looking to protect their head, they’ll give me the body.” The next pitch was behind him. “The next one, I hit him in the side.”

Pete Rose’s response was even more devastating than Dock had anticipated. He smiled. Then he picked the ball up, where it had fallen beside him, and gently, underhanded, tossed it back to Dock. Then he lit for first as if trying out for the Olympics.

As Dock says, with huge approval, “You have to be good, to be a hot dog.”

As Rose bent down to pick up the ball, he had exchanged a word with Joe Morgan who was batting next. [...] Morgan taunted Rose, “He doesn’t like you anyway. You’re a white guy.”

Dock hit Morgan in the kidneys with his first pitch.

“The next batter was Driessen. I threw a ball to him. High and inside. The next one, I hit him in the back.”

[...]

Bases loaded, no outs. Tony Perez, Cincinnati first baseman, came to bat. He did not dig in. “There was no way I could hit him. He was running. The first one I threw behind him, over his head, up against the screen, but it came back off the glass, and they didn’t advance. I threw behind him because he was backing up, but then he stepped in front of the ball. The next three pitches, he was running. . . . I walked him.” A run came in. “The next hitter was Johnny Bench. I tried to deck him twice. I threw at his jaw, and he moved. I threw at the back of his head, and he moved.”

Al Oliver told what happened next in his 1997 autobiography Baseball’s Best Kept Secret:

Danny Murtaugh came to the mound. “Dock it looks like you don’t have your good stuff tonight,” Danny said.

I wanted to laugh. It took everything I had in me to suppress it. I’m sure Danny knew what was going on with Dock that night; he was no dummy. Knowing Murtaugh, he probably liked it, but he had to come out to the mound.

Manny Sanguillen -
The Reds said something in the paper, and Dock told me, “I’m going to knock everybody down.” I just sat there and he threw the ball. He said, “No matter what you do, I’m going to throw the ball at them. No matter what you say, I’m going to throw at them.” Dock didn’t care.

When Danny came to the mound he asked, “Dock, what happened?”

Dock told him, “Nothing’s wrong chief,” and Murtaugh asked him for the ball. Danny liked these kind of players. Fighters. You want to be on a club that’s strong. That has respect.

Joe Posnanski summed up Dock’s efforts in a 2009 blog post:

Did the mowdown serve its purpose? Hard to say. The Pirates continued to play uninspired ball well into August — they still had a losing record on August 11th. But the division was so even that they were only 2 1/2 games back at the time. And they won 31 of their last 47 games to win the division title. They lost to the Dodgers in the NLCS.

Dock shares the record for most hit batsmen in a single inning at three — with a whole slew of other pitchers. However, not only is he not the only NL pitcher with three hit batsmen in the first inning (Candiotti, Hawley, Weaver), he’s not the only Bucco pitcher with that distinction (Deacon Phillippe in 1905).

Dock does stand alone with the dubious record for most consecutive hit batsmen (with three) in that game, and according to the Plunk Everyone blog, Dock is “the only post-1960 pitcher to hit 3 batters without recording an out”.

Mark Ecko’s complex.com voted this incident baseball’s number one greatest retaliation.

Bob Gibson was a badass!

“The first person that I ever heard refer to the mound as his office was Gibson,”[Tim] McCarver said, referring to his former teammate, Hall of Famer Bob Gibson. “And (Steve) Carlton picked that up.

“In fact, when Pete Rose would make an out — particularly on a flyball unless it was the third out of an an inning — he would intentionally run over the back of the mound on his way back to the dugout if the dugout was on the third-base side. He would intimidate rookie pitchers in that regard.

“He tried that once with Gibson in the mid-60s and Gibson threw at him the next time up. Pete spat at him. And the next one was a lot closer. Pete didn’t spit the second time.”

Mike Axissa thinks it’s much ado about nothing.

To be quite frank, this whole mound issue is just a bit of nonsense. You’re talking about an old school, unwritten rule that was enforced with a pitch to the ribs a lifetime ago.

Maybe back to the era when pitchers were badasses, before the owners lowered the mound and the millionaire athletes in body armor crowded the inside? More power to Dallas Braden for staking his territory, but the proper old-school baseball way is to seethe on it and let it fester silently … and then plunk him in the ribs.

Dock Ellis told Donald Hall how he established his reputation:

Cepeda is the biggest … He was trying to take advantage of me because I was a rookie. He was trying to scare me. I let him know, then, that I was not the type of dude to fuck around with. It was a big thing, because who would be hitting Cepeda? If you went for the biggest guy, it meant you would go for anybody. You weren’t scared of anybody.

Must have been versus Atlanta, on August 2, 1970, since that’s the only time Dock Ellis hit Cepeda. Dock was by no means a rookie, and he also hit Rico Carty in that game.

Watch the clip. Alex Rodriguez appears to have crossed directly over the rubber on the mound. Pitchers are a superstitious lot, and the route appears to have been intentional, to get in the head of Braden we would guess. A-Rod played it off coyly after the game, but he is not so naive. His mindgame had the exact opposite effect as apparently intended – given the outcome of the ballgame. There is, however, more than one game in a season …

Direct link to the Video on YouTube

We’re developing on top of WordPress, because it truly appears to be extensible, robust, and easy to work with. What you see is just the tip of the iceberg, slapped together simply to stake out this project’s long-delayed online presence. Coming at a later date will be a wiki built on the Dokuwiki engine, and a Dublin Core compliant CMS system using Omeka, which should allow us to delve into crowd sourcing some of the production.

We have in place today the bare essence of the content flow — blog and twitter feed, supplemented by custom RSS feeds. The blog is to be the beating heart of the content body. Our plan is to share original content about the film, Dock Ellis, and the process of making a documentary in the blog. Our hope is to make this as open as possible, so you can learn along with us. Think of it as an early, behind the scenes DVD-extra for the film.

As the website grows, we will add tiered access to additional content. At one end of the spectrum are those of us who are aggregating and creating information. At the other end will be anyone who casually browses by the website. Investors will receive open access, albeit slightly restricted. Friends and contributors will be offered VIP status, allowing entrance into the film’s virtual green room. That is the plan at this stage. The details may kill us.

(1) Excellent opportunity for undergraduate or graduate students in LIS or CIS. Candidates must possess a basic knowledge of Content Management Systems and XML. Knowledge or experience with Dublin Core or Omeka a big plus. You will assist in the design of a content workflow and digital asset management schema for the varied assets of the production. Please respond with a cover letter that details your interest and experience with metadata, CMS, XML, and any other relevant tools.

(2) An interest in sports, and baseball in particular, would be preferred. This is an excellent opportunity for students in RTF, History or Sociology. Position will require self-guided research in public archives as well as stock photo and video repositories. Please respond with a cover letter that details your interest and research experience.

All inquiries may be directed to jobs AT nonodock.com

Dock Ellis is best known for a no-hitter (or “no no”) he threw while pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates on June 12, 1970 in San Diego. After his professional baseball career ended, Dock revealed that he was high on LSD that day. He claims to have pitched every game of his professional career high, and that in his time over 90% of ballplayers played under the influence of amphetamines.

Dock Ellis died in December 2008, and spent the latter half of his life as a drug counselor working with troubled youth and prisoners in California. Dock’s honesty about his past was refreshing and inspirational to musicians, artists and countless ordinary people struggling with their own abuse problems.