Son of Dock LSD

David Wells is preparing for a Barbara Walters special. First, he admitted to using ephedra for weight loss, apparnetly unsuccessfully. Now, he has admitted to pitching a perfect game "half drunk" and on only one hour of sleep. He at least did not go so far as to murder (allegedly) his wife like Robert Blake did, but his rhetoric is escalating.

"As of this writing, 15 men in the history of organized baseball have ever thrown a perfect game,'' he writes in galleys of the book. "Only one of those men did it half-drunk, with bloodshot eyes, monster breath and a raging, skull-rattling hangover. That would be me.''

The book, Perfect I'm Not! Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball, will be published April 1 by William Morrow, a subsidiary of News Corp.

The pungency of Boomer's breath aside--maybe monster breath is as close to minty fresh as he can get--, I beg to differ on the difficulty involved in the event.

Dock Ellis never pitched a perfect game, but he had a no-hitter in 1970 and he pitched it on an hallucinogen. Ellis disclosed it in his autobiography as well. I guess some sort of addictive substance is required in a baseball tell-all.

I remember the story reading like something by Hunter S. Thompson. Ellis claimed that sometimes the catcher's glove was a tiny dot and other times it seemed as large as a house. And all he was trying to do was hit that amorphous, Technicolor glove with the ball. Why a crappy movie about him featuring Christina Ricci was never made, I do not know.

Ellis and Wells also shared flaky personas. Ellis wore curlers in his hair in the locker room, had a flare for polemic, and once hit three batters in a row to tie the still-standing record. Not to sound like John Rocker, but they also both pitched for the Yankees. Of course, the mid-Seventies Yankees were a much different team from today's and that tends to accentuate Wells peccadilloes a bit more even without monster breath.