Pitching a no-hitter, while crying

Happy friday, team! I know you're all anxious to read something so I found...stuff to read. Okay.

First up is a great article in a dallas paper about Dock Ellis, the pitcher who once threw a no-hitter on LSD...but there's even more interesting stuff about his career than just that:

He had the arm speed and leg strength, but he also relied heavily on strategy--which consisted almost entirely of intimidation.

"It's such an important aspect of the game," he says. "Like hitting batsmen. All hitters know they're gonna get hit. They just don't know when. The kicker for the truly good hitters is, you cannot hit me as many times as I'm gonna hit you. They take that hit to get six hits. But you gotta pop their ass so you can get an 0 for 4 on them one day. Don't get cocky now, motherfucker. The challenge is on. So let's get it on. Other guys might explain it differently, have different reasons, but that was mine.

"Right about the time I left, it changed. You can't throw at anyone without getting thrown out of the game. The announcers today say it ruins the game. They never talk about the fights that Cincinnati and St. Louis got into 30 years ago. Barry Bonds? I'd hit him at least once a game. 'Cause he's got all that shit on. Yeah, let's see that shit stop the ball from hurting him if I hit him on the motherfucking elbow or something. I'd hit him just to see, does it work?"

It was also that 1971 All-Star game that first gained Ellis his reputation as a militant--an image later etched in stone by the 1976 biography Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, which declared him "baseball's Muhammad Ali."

Also, on slate today is an article by the guy who came up with the idea for the Crying while Eating website...