Ellis, who grew up in Los Angeles in an era when inner-city baseball thrived, wore curlers in his hair during batting practice, went into the stands and sat next to hecklers, and described himself as a baseball militant, speaking out about injustices in an era when players had much less power  and money  than they do today.

But it was Ellis’s claim, after he retired, that he threw his no-hitter while under the influence of LSD that cemented his standing as an icon of the sport’s counterculture era, making him an intriguing figure to artists, musicians, filmmakers and journalists  even after his death.

“Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball,” a 1976 biography, was written with the poet laureate Donald Hall. Robin Williams has riffed on the no-hitter in a stand-up routine, and several musicians have written songs about it. Blagden’s film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

“People respond to it because of the sheer disbelief,” said Donnell Alexander, whose 2008 radio interview with Ellis for American Public Media was one of his last and is working on a script about him. “This story has been sitting there for 40 years, and you haven’t heard of it. Here’s this amazing out-of-body experience and nobody told us about it.”

Alexander’s report, recorded with his colleague Neille Ilel as part of a two-and-a-half-hour conversation at Ellis’s home in Apple Valley, Calif., was produced in the wake of the Mitchell report and soon after Roger Clemens testified before Congress that he had not used performance-enhancing drugs. Clemens was arraigned last Monday on charges that he lied to Congress.

Although some might view LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) as the antisteroid  a performance-de-enhancing drug, Isenberg called it  Alexander said he saw Ellis’s use of it differently. While working in Chico, Calif., he had come across a high school football team in which a majority of the offensive starters took acid. The team, Alexander said, went undefeated.

“There’s a forbidden aspect of it,” Alexander said of the drug. “It’s exotic.”

So, although David Wells said he was half-drunk from the night before when he pitched his perfect game for the Yankees in 1998, and stimulants have long been a part of baseball culture, just as marijuana has been in the N.B.A., the idea that hallucinogenic drugs might find their way into sports interested Alexander.