The 5 Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High

The Accomplishment:

In the hundreds of thousands of games in MLB history, there have been only 247 in which the starting pitcher records every out without giving up a hit. Pedro Martinez, like most pitchers, has gone his entire career without throwing one. In fact his team, the Mets, who've been sending a pitcher out to the mound 162 times every season for 46 years, have never had a pitcher throw one. Dock Ellis became one of the few to ever do it on June 20, 1970, though he barely remembers it.

The Drug:

Acid. The day of the no-hitter, Dock Ellis woke up around noon on what he thought was Friday and ate three tabs of acid, presumably because he was tired of Wheaties. But when his girlfriend arrived she was carrying Saturday's newspaper, which meant he'd slept through Friday or that his girlfriend's was a time traveler. The sports page had more bad news, he was scheduled to pitch in San Diego in six hours. Not only was the day that was beginning to swim around him the wrong one, the city his day was swimming in was Los Angeles.

"Not one thing about today makes sense to me."

We probably wouldn't have gone to the ball park that day (not to mention slept through a Friday and eaten LSD for breakfast). But Ellis had pitched high before. And by that we mean he had never pitched sober. Starting with booze as a high school prodigy and moving up through amphetamines and cocaine in the MLB, his Pirate teammates often took bets on whether anyone could take as many amphetamines as Dock.

Unfazed despite being on enough acid to melt Jimi Hendrix's guitar, Ellis hopped a flight to San Diego, and faced down a lineup that had woken up knowing what day it was, and also had the upper hand in the "not on acid" category. Not a single one got a hit.

Ellis remembers very little about the game, other than that sometimes the ball was huge in his hands and sometimes it was tiny, and that at one point he dove out of the way of a line drive, only to look up and see that the ball hadn't even reached the mound. If this sounds like a ridiculous cartoon to you, that's probably what it looked like to Ellis. So how the fuck did Ellis manage to pitch a better game than Pedro Martinez ever would?

Why It Makes Sense:

Writing in the New Yorker, Oliver Sacks describes a state of mind known as "the zone" in which "A baseball ... approaching at close to a hundred miles per hours ... may seem to be almost immobile in the air, its very seams strikingly visible... in a suddenly enlarged and spacious timescape." The zone is typically brought on by confidence, adrenaline and being fucking awesome at baseball. Ellis was all of those things, and LSD's affects include increased heart rate and the slowing down of time. So it's conceivable that Ellis tripped his way into the zone.

What Ellis saw the day of his no-hitter.

A large part of throwing a no hitter is getting over the fact that you're throwing one. As the game goes on and the lonely bastard in the middle of the diamond gets closer to immortality, the tension in the park and in the pitcher builds. Trying to throw a no hitter is such a mind fuck that it's considered the height of dickery for a teammate to acknowledge the no-hitter until the final out is recorded.

But baseball history was the last thing on Ellis' mind, keeping his shit together while a bunch of giant lizards fucked in the on-deck circle being the first.

Before You Go Trying It...

Ellis had the career trajectory of Darryl Strawberry, never reaching his potential because of drug addiction. Instead of being a household name, Dock Ellis is just that guy who threw a no-hitter on acid.

The Accomplishment:

There's plenty of controversy surrounding certain parts of the Bible, (where are the dinosaurs?), but most can agree that the Ten Commandments make some good points: killing is wrong, stealing is wrong, and weekends are for sleeping.

When the whole world was presumably murdering whoever they wanted and coveting the shit out of anything that crossed their paths, Moses was the one who God deemed suitable enough to pass his commandments onto. So, one day in... Biblical times, an audience gathered and politely waited while Moses met with God on the top of Mount Sinai to discuss the rules that we still use today, (or are, at the very least, aware of).

The Drug:

Mushrooms.

Drugs weren't invented yesterday, you know. In fact, they grow right up out of the ground, all on their own. The area surrounding Mt Sinai, for example, was home to two common psychedelic drugs and, according to a 2008 Time and Mind article written by Benny Shanon, a professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, psychedelic mushrooms and other mind-altering substances played a huge role in the religious rites of Israelites during Biblical times.

While it would be irresponsible of us to assume Moses was drugged up based solely on the fact that drugs were both acceptable and available at the time, Professor Shanon maintains that the scene described in Exodus, (involving blaring trumpets, bright lighting and thunder), fits the "classic imaginings of people on drugs" and further that "the seeing of light [that occurs in hallucinations] is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings."

Why It Makes Sense:

The evidence isn't completely conclusive, but a closer look at our choices leads to a fairly obvious answer. Either:

1. God visited Moses and decided that he was the perfect spokesman for his commandments, (despite Moses's total lack of previous experience in the supernatural-commandment-liaison department), and all of Moses's friends and family believed him when he said "God spoke to me" and instantly stopped coveting shit.

Or

2. A group of extremely bored Israelites ate a bunch of easily-accessible mushrooms and imagined a bunch of crazy shit.

"Is anybody else freaking out a little bit?"

It was thousands of years ago. No Internet, no TV. There wasn't much to do other than eat plants, particularly when those plants led to conversations with God. It doesn't take a college professor to figure this one out, (although, technically, it did this time).

Still, this is a pretty huge deal. Everyone wants to say how dangerous it is to use psychedelic drugs, but Moses takes a few and comes up with a set of morally sound rules that have held up for thousands of years and, for some, serves as a reason not to murder the guy in front of you who's taking an annoyingly long time at the ATM.

Before You Go Trying It...

There's a really good chance that eating random mushrooms you find on the ground will kill your ass.

Also, we don't think we're speaking out of turn here when we point out how sloppy and half-assed the Ten Commandments are. If you're going to create a system of unchangeable rules meant to govern large groups of people, you might want to think "manual" instead of a "grocery list."

"We should be good with just this, right guys?"

Something with a FAQ page at least. "What about murdering in self defense? And what if your neighbor's wife is really hot? Do two Commandments cancel each other out? Can I murder my hot neighbor's stupid husband?"

Like most stoners (take for instance the ones in Pineapple Express, a movie you should totally see), Moses was probably too lazy to do all that extra work so he just sort of summarized, but the rest of us can agree that it would've been nice to have those answers.