The story of Dock Ellis reads like a great American tall tale, a ’70s equivalent of Paul Bunyan or John Henry. A major-league baseball pitcher in the years when the sport was riddled with eccentrics and facial hair, Ellis had an outsize, utterly reckless personality. He beaned batters at will. He feuded and drank. And, in a notorious 1970 incident recounted in the new Todd Snider song “America’s Favorite Pastime,” Ellis threw a no-hitter…supposedly while on LSD.

Ellis was playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he started and ended his career. (He would also play for both the Yankees and, briefly, the Mets.) According to lore, the pitcher was under the impression that he had the day off. And so, like any sensible young American would have done in 1970, he dropped acid. By the time he was called into work, Ellis found that “the ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes.” Chewing his gum “until it turned to powder,” he threw the game of his life, vanquishing San Diego in his career’s only no-hitter.

The superb Nashville songwriter Snider—profiled by TONY in 2004—sings about Ellis’s trippy game on a new record on Yep Roc, The Homerun EP. (The song will also appear on Snider’s forthcoming album, The Excitement Plan.) It is not the first song about Ellis—San Francisco singer Barbara Manning beat him by a stretch. True to form, Snider, who has a talent for viewing the world crookedly, reads Ellis as an everyman hero. “He showed up to work completely prepared for something else entirely,” Snider explains in a press release. Yet he “still did a great job at the job in front of him, giving ill-prepared people everywhere someone to look up to.”

“Americas Favorite Pastime” — Todd Snider