The bet was made in the spring of 1974, while the Pittsburgh Pirates took batting practice in Bradenton, Fla. Kurt Bevacqua was shagging in the outfield when Dock Ellis jogged past. Ellis stopped to offer a wager. The stakes revolved around a steak.
“Hey rook,” Ellis told Bevacqua, “I bet you a Chateaubriand I don’t get out of the first inning when I face the Reds.”
Bevacqua was not exactly sure what Ellis was talking about, or why Ellis thought he was still a rookie (he wasn’t). Ellis didn’t give his new teammate much time to consider the terms. He went back to running. Bevacqua turned to the coaches. Details become blurry when legends are being made, but Bevacqua can still recall his bewilderment.
“What the fuck is it with this guy?” Bevacqua asked.
There wasn’t an easy answer. Ellis lived a kaleidoscopic life. Most remember him for the day in 1970 when he dropped acid and threw a no-hitter. He did a lot more than that. He railed against the prejudice black men faced in his sport. He advocated for the rights of athletes. He lobbied Congress to fund research into sickle-cell anemia. Later in life, he kicked drugs and drinking. He counseled addicts and inmates before he died in 2008. He did big things that resounded in American culture and little things that reshaped lives.
Here is another thing he did:
In the spring of 1974, Dock Ellis decided he was sick of the Cincinnati Reds’ shit. The Big Red Machine was ascending. Three years removed from a World Series, the Pirates were on the decline. Ellis couldn’t abide by how his teammates handled the paradigm shift. When he saw the Reds, he vowed to send a message. On the first day of May, he got his chance.
Forty-six years later, the voice of Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen boomed over the phone. He was a couple of weeks away from his 76th birthday. The passage of time hadn’t dimmed his memory of May 1, 1974. Had he known what Dock was up to? Of course, Sanguillen cackled.
“He said to everybody, ‘I’m going to hit every single one of them who comes up to hit today,'” Sanguillen said. “We knew what was going to happen.”
Ellis had been talking about this for a while. He told some teammates. He told his agent, Tom Reich. He even talked about it with a writer named Donald Hall, who would later become the poet laureate of the United States, at a party a week before the game. Ellis was tired of the Reds, and how he felt the Pirates would cower when facing Pete Rose and Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench and Tony Perez and the other cogs in the Machine.
“Spring training had just begun, and I say, ‘You are scared of Cincinnati,” Ellis later told Hall for a book they collaborated on. “That’s what I told my teammates. ‘You are always scared of Cincinnati.’ I’ve watched us lose games against Cincinnati and it’s ridiculous.”
At the start of the 1970s, the two clubs jockeyed for control of the National League. The Pirates ruled the East. Located a five-hour drive away, the Reds ran the West. Cincinnati bounced Pittsburgh from the playoffs in 1970 and 1972. In between, the Pirates captured their fourth world championship.
Something about the 1972 National League Championship Series stuck with Ellis, he would explain later. The Reds won Game 5 when Bench homered in the ninth to tie the game; minutes later, George Foster dashed home with two outs when Bob Moose lost a wild pitch. As the Reds sprayed champagne, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, Pirates outfielder Al Oliver visited the victors. “You’re still No. 1,” Perez told Oliver.
The Enquirer quoted a number of Reds displaying magnanimity toward the dethroned champs. Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson told the Associated Press “there are two No. 1 teams in the National League.” Ellis remembered the scene somewhat differently. The Reds, he told Hall, “go on TV and say the Pirates ain’t nothing.” Several decades later, Ellis told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the Reds “called our team dumb.”
Whatever caused the slight, Ellis would not forget. There was no rematch the next year. Roberto Clemente died on Dec. 31, 1972. Pittsburgh won only 80 games in 1973 as a three-year stretch atop the East ended. As the Pirates assembled for 1974, most of their championship core was still around: Sanguillen behind the plate, Oliver and Willie Stargell in the outfield, Richie Hebner and Bob Robertson on the corners. Bevacqua came aboard as a utility man in a trade with Kansas City and found himself awed by their camaraderie: “What a bunch of crazy asses,” he thought.
“They were all-in on shenanigans, they were all-in on pranks,” Bevacqua said. “They were as street-hard as you could possibly get, but with a heart of gold. Boy, it was so much fun to play with those guys. And leading the pack was Dock.”
Ellis turned 29 that spring. He had been up in the majors since 1968. He was a good pitcher capable of reaching elevated heights. When he made the All-Star team in 1971, he started after daring Anderson to let him take the baseball against Athletics ace Vida Blue, because Major League Baseball would “never start two brothers against each other.” Ellis spoke his mind. He was never boring. His teammates adored him.
“Dock was a great human being,” Sanguillen said. “We were brothers.”
A little more than 8,000 fans gathered at Three Rivers Stadium as Ellis stared down the Reds lineup. There wasn’t much reason for optimism. The Pirates had lost the first six games of the season. It hadn’t got much better. So Ellis figured he could smite two birds with one stone, teaching the Reds a lesson while motivating his own mates. The proverbial stone would take the form of a series of wayward pitches.
The leadoff batter was Rose. Ellis considered Rose a friend, but one still worthy of targeting. Rose stood on the edge of the batter’s box as Ellis warmed up. Near the end of the ritual, Ellis flung a fastball in Rose’s direction. The actual pitches would come much closer. The first soared over Rose’s head. The next flew behind him. The third connected. Rose picked up the baseball and underhanded it to Ellis. The act left Ellis impressed.
“You have to be good, to be a hot dog,” he told Hall.
Still, Ellis was undeterred by Rose’s nonchalance. Morgan chuckled to Sanguillen that he would not meet the same fate as his teammate. He was wrong. Ellis drilled Morgan in the armpit with his next pitch. To the plate came Reds third baseman Dan Driessen. He also figured he was safe from retribution; no pitcher would plunk three men in a row. A fastball soon sizzled through the chilly air and smashed into his thigh.
“It’s not nice to hit a man when it’s cold out,” Driessen told The Dayton Daily News. “I don’t mind telling you it stung.”
By now, the secret was out. The message had been received. With the bases loaded, Perez stepped into the batter’s box. His feet did not stay there long. Perez ducked and dodged four pitches for a heart-pounding walk. “He was running like crazy,” Sanguillen said.
Perez prevented Ellis from making history; no pitcher has ever hit four batters in a row. With Bench up, Ellis tried to start a new streak. Bench followed the same script as Perez, providing a moving target that Ellis could not find. After two balls, Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh intervened. He took the baseball from Ellis and called to the bullpen.
“Sangy, what happened?” Murtaugh said to his catcher.
Murtaugh asked if Sanguillen had been calling the pitches. In the pregame meeting, Ellis had told Sanguillen not to worry about sequences. But the catcher protected his teammate. He professed ignorance.
One day this spring, Sanguillen roared with laughter when pondering how such a spectacle would play in 2020. He had just heard Commissioner Rob Manfred forbid pitchers from targeting the Astros. The 1970s were a long time ago.
“You’d be suspended for life,” Sanguillen said. “Even the catcher would be suspended! And the manager!”
There was no suspension in 1974. No fines. The benches didn’t even clear for a fight. In the immediate aftermath, Ellis blamed his wildness on an eight-day layoff. He was less coy with his teammates. On his way to the clubhouse, he grabbed his jacket in the dugout. Bevacqua was nearby. Ellis hadn’t forgotten about the bet.
“I’ll take it medium-rare,” Ellis said.
The Pirates lost that night. Their record fell to 6-13. If Ellis had expected an instant turnaround, he didn’t cause it. But Pittsburgh caught fire in August. They played .632 baseball in the second half and won their division. Cincinnati missed the playoffs in 1974 but won titles the next two seasons. The one-man protest from Ellis may not have altered the course of baseball history, but it did make for one hell of a story.
Bevacqua often played a role in the tale. The way Ellis told it, Bevacqua offered the Chateaubriand as a challenge to follow through on his promise to mow down the Reds. Bevacqua told another version. “I didn’t bet anything!” Bevacqua said. “It was more that I was the only one who had anything to lose, when I look back on it.”
Bevacqua paid up. Ellis made sure of it.
In 1978, Bevacqua, Ellis and fellow former Pirate Richie Zisk were reunited as teammates in Texas. Bevacqua and Zisk roomed together on the road. Near the end of the season, Ellis dropped a paper bag between them.
“That’s for you guys,” Ellis said.
Bevacqua was stumped. He opened the bag. Inside was a bundle of cash. Something like $2,700, Bevacqua recalled.
“Does he owe you money?” Bevacqua asked Zisk.
“No.”
“Well, he doesn’t owe me any money.”
The duo visited Ellis. What was going on? Ellis was beaming. He was paying his tab, he explained. He had been signing his room-service bills to Bevacqua and Zisk’s room for most of the season. Now they were even.
“Dock Ellis was a hell of a guy,” Bevacqua said. “As crazy as he was … you know what? He just did crazy shit. He really wasn’t that crazy.”
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