“It galls me now that Dock is now largely thought of as a goof, if he’s thought of at all. Try not to be left alone, Jackie Robinson told him. Well, that’s what we’ve done to him: We’ve left him alone. Dock is unstuck from baseball’s history, a character in a funny story. No one puts him on a continuum with Jackie Robinson on one end and free agency on the other. But that’s where I see him, a black ballplayer straddling the reserve-clause era and the arrival of free agency, a man who brought many of the ways of old with him into baseball’s new, Day-Glo epoch.”
-Donnell Alexander, whose public radio interview with Dock Ellis was later used as the audio for the animated short Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No, on the legacy of Ellis.
From the Deadspin article What Dock Ellis Taught Me About Drugs, Spitballs, Hair Curlers, Office Culture, Race, and America.