“You should enter a baseball field the way you enter a church.” -Bill Lee

I was lucky to grow up in a time of oddball pitchers. Mark Fidrych a.k.a. “The Bird,” Bill Lee and Dock Ellis were three of the central summertime characters of my youth.

Dock, who threw a no hitter on LSD in 1970, spoke to the Dallas press recently and now the story of his no-hitter is circulating again. Good. Maybe, in light of such a performance, some people might question the drug’s reported harmfulness. I know that’s a lot to ask, and it’s ever more to ask that one read Acid Dreams, a rigorously researched book on the widespread counter intelligence efforts made against LSD by the FBI in the 1960s.

The answers are out there. Discover them at your own risk. But let Dock’s no-hitter serve as evidence that on a good day, one can find clarity, concentration and endurance in LSD.