The bio is called Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball and I highly recommend it. It was a collaboration between the master storyteller Dock and future US poet laureate Donald Hall.

What made the case strange was that Blackmun was a big baseball fan and he opened the opinion with a list of his favorite all-time players. This consumed seven pages of the court ruling and was a much-criticized tactic, to say the least. These are Blackmun’s favorites, forever immortalized in the law books:

“Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson,
Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O’Farrell, Lefty O’Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove. [Footnote 3] The list seems endless.”

As in a Doberman’s ears. As in “Of the Bay.” As in what happens to your salary if you fuck up one too many times.

Even as a kid I was aware of this anomaly, just as I was aware of my father being mildly disdainful of his outspoken rhetoric, self-absorbed quasi-iconoclastic behavior, and, primarily, his wearing of hair curlers.

I recall Dock as bigger than life, just like the rest of the early-70′s Pirates. I recall him somehow putting together a good season for the hated Yankees after coming over in that trade, (for M.D. Medich, as it were… along with ‘throw-in’ Willie Randolph). And even though his achievements in pinstripes are ovelooked today in a haze of Catfish and Sparky memories, it just may have been Ellis who put that ’76 team over the top.
(You think Ken Brett would have won 17 games?)

And of couse I recall the anticipation when he finally washed up on the desiccated shores of Shea Stadium during the long miserable summer of ’79 , his “stuff” long gone, his competitive fire long doused…
I don’t know what it was I expected, maybe some excitement? outrageous antics? showmanship? acid-drenched no-hit hijinks? (though I doubt I was
aware of the particulars…)

Let’s just say that had the term “*…Meh…*” been invented at the time it would have summed things up admirably. And would suffice nicely as well to describe the John Pacellas and Pete Falcones of the era, lurching gracelessly about NL pitchers mounds hither and yon, all summer long…

The epilogue of 1979 had a somewhat happy denoument, though, at least in Dock’s case. I forget if Josh has expounded upon the circumstances, but somehow or other the Mets ended up selling Ellis to the first place Pirates with a week and a half left in the season, (ostensibly for a bag of broken bats and a pop-up toaster).

Though crippled, washed-up, and ineligible for the post-season, Dock appeared in three games, the last of his career, and one would like to think of his final moments in major league ball as happy ones….

The prodigal son, all but finished, back in black (and gold)… out of the limelight perhaps, nattily dressed, not in uniform, but in street clothes, but STILL, somehow, a tiny part of that 1979 World Championship Priate Team…

Maybe dancing a few carfully measured, but still funky steps on the home dugout roof after Game 5, long after the grounds crew had swept away the evening’s roar, and departed…
Sharing a celebratory rail of Peruvian flake in the clubhouse with Dave Parker and Mike Easler perhaps, or a toot from a 24K spoon/necklace medallion with the Pirate Parrot…
And perchance a final sip of champagne-laced backwash, all the sweeter given his exile, fall, and return…

Dock probably didn’t get a ring to match his one from ’71, but he was THERE somehow, and somehow that’s enough to make me happy. Good for him, and God bless.

Josh, can you reprint the name of his biography again, and is does it come recommended? Cheers.

PS on the Oyez website (sorry, can’t add link from iPhone), there’s a pretty fun game matching Justices with their baseball equivalents. Some connections are kinda tenuous (Scalia and Pedro, e.g.), but a fun distraction for anyone who spends a lot of time thinking of these two worlds.

Being “underrated” is a subjective thing but I think Grich is the most underrated player in Baseball history.

The thing that hurt Grich is he spent almost all of his career in pitcher’s parks, Memorial/Big A. Second basemen tend to be a little underrated overall as well. I think Grich would have gotten in the HOF if he played in a hitter’s park like Wrigley or Fenway or even in a neutral park like Busch.

It’s not just that they attained great heights on the field during the 1970s; there’s also something iconic about them, something that connects to me on a vital level, the mere mention of the name strong enough to make me feel the flicker of the kind of engagement with the world that I felt most strongly as a child.

Josh, this speaks to something I’ve been thinking about recently. I picked up Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball</i. recently and it led me to other books on hoops. One of them was Free Darko's Macrophenomenal Almanac. It’s sort of like a scouting profile of some NBA stars if the scouts were those kids that sat at the table of the cafe in high school that was the intersection of the geek set and the stoner set. Anyways, they have a manifesto and part of it is the theory of liberated fandom. Part of this theory is actually old-fashioned Grantland Rice stuff. Ya know, “It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game.” But it isn’t meant in the way Rice intended. He was talking more about sportsmanship. They’re talking more about playing with style.

I mentioned Fidrych in a recent post at my larval blog, but Reggie had the same je ne sais quoi quality about him as well. He was entertaining both when he homered and when he struck out. His tenure in New York was soap operatic enough that ESPN eventually made a miniseries about his first year there. Too, he was more outspoken than today’s players. But I’m not sure if he would be as iconic today, when strikeouts and home runs are more common than they were in my youth.

Seaver and Aaron were in the inner circle of inner circle HOFers. Yaz, well we were part Polish and we were Red Sox fans. If I could hold a seance and talk to my dad, he was probably his favorite player of all time.