From Allen's Alley to Cooperstown at Last
New Hall of Famer Dick Allen, Long Overdue
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Dick Allen hoped to continue breeding thoroughbread race horces when his baseball career ended, but the thoroughbred farm he launched ultimately perished in an electrical fire.
. . . His thoroughbred interests provoked Allen’s memorable wisecrack about artificial turf: “If my horse can’t eat it, I don’t want to play on it.”
. . . Those 1960s Phillies fans who didn’t let racism or racists dim their appreciation of Allen’s prodigious power often hung banners in the outfield seats proclaiming those locations part of “Allen’s Alley.”
Leading Off
Finally! Dick Allen is Voted into the Hall of Fame
By Russ Walsh
This past Sunday, the Hall of Fame’s Classic Baseball Era Committee selected Dick Allen for the Hall of Fame. For many of us who watched Allen play in the 1960s and 70s, this feels just and long overdue.
For a dozen years, Allen was the most formidable player I ever saw approach home plate with a bat. Broad shouldered, slim waisted, with bulging biceps and forearms, he looked like John Henry swinging a sledgehammer. And when his 40-ounce bat connected with a baseball, magic happened.
I am one of those fortunate enough to have been in the stands in Connie Mack Stadium, craning my neck around the pillars in the old grandstand, as one of Allen’s majestic home runs sailed over the left-centerfield roof and completely out of the park. You didn’t so much cheer, as stand, mouth agape in awe. Nobody went for a hot dog when Dick Allen came to the plate.
Allen was also controversial and combative and in the words of more than one manager, “difficult.” His reputation as a troublemaker, along with his lacking the conventional numbers of a Hall of Famer—he didn’t hit close to 500 homers; he had fewer than 2,000 hits—likely kept him out of the Hall in his lifetime. But as Jayson Stark points out in The Athletic, Allen’s incredible numbers are better described by modern metrics.
His 165 OPS+ during his 11-year peak puts him in the same league as contemporaries like Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, and Willie McCovey. His selection is late, but well-deserved.
Most Philly kids of a certain age have a favorite Allen remembrance. Here is mine.
In the summer of 1967, during the break between my sophomore and junior years of college, I was sharing a basement apartment off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, with my good buddy from high school, Bruce Ingraham. I had a summer job working for the Mayflower Moving Company and was taking full advantage of the rich cultural and social life the Nation’s Capital afforded. Among those advantages was the drinking age of 19.
As a just-turned 20-year-old, this was my first experience of being able to walk into a bar, any bar, and order a beer. I can honestly say that this boy from more restrictive Pennsylvania took full advantage of this unique opportunity.
I had not seen much baseball that summer. Our apartment did not have a television, and Bruce was not a baseball fan, but I was determined to take in the 1967 All-Star Game, which was to be played on July 11 in the year-old Anaheim Stadium, home of the Angels in Anaheim, California. I hadn’t missed an All-Star Game in at least ten years, and I wasn’t going to miss this one, with my Phillies hero, Dick Allen, in the starting lineup.
I decided to take in the game at my new favorite watering hole, the Ben Bow Inn on Connecticut Avenue. The Ben Bow was a dimly lit, narrow joint that resembled a ship’s galley, as one might expect of a place named after a tavern in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It hosted an eclectic mix of patrons ranging from beat poets to rednecks, students to businessmen, gay liberationists to motorcycle gang members.
Most important, now, it had a television tuned to the All-Star game and Michelob Dark beer on tap. I was about halfway through my first Michelob, when Allen, batting fifth in the order, stepped to the plate to lead off the top of the second inning. There was no score in the game. The pitcher was the Minnesota Twins' ace Dean Chance, getting a chance to start the All-Star game in the town where he had been a star pitcher for the Angels for many years.
Allen worked the count to 1-1 and then smashed a low and away breaking ball to deep centerfield. Tony Oliva, playing center, raced back and then gave up as the ball disappeared over the fence. The announcer, Tony Kubek, was gob smacked that Allen could hit that pitch that far. You can see it all happen here.
I let out a loud "WHOOP," as the ball cleared the fence, which brought the disapproving eyes of several patrons down on me. Washington was an American League town in those days, the home of the recently reconstituted Washington Senators, and the former home, until 1961, of what was now Chance's and Oliva's team, the Twins. Anyway, I calmed down and smiled into my beer.
Allen's solo homer stood up until the bottom of the sixth, when Orioles immortal Brooks Robinson took the Cubs' Ferguson Jenkins (a former Phillie) deep. The score remained tied at 1-1 as the night rolled on. Allen had three more at bats and struck out all three times. Phillies lefthander Chris Short, entered the game in the ninth inningand, to my great pleasure, pitched very well, shutting the American Leaguers down on one hit and one walk.
In the tenth, with the winning run on second base, Short struck out Angels shortstop Jim Fregosi. By the twelfth inning I was well into my fourth beer and counting my change to see if I could afford another.
Thankfully, the National League finally broke through when the Cincinnati Reds' Tony Perez connected against the Kansas City Athletics' Catfish Hunter. The New York Mets' Tom Seaver came on in the bottom of the twelfth to lock down the National League victory. (The 15-inning game was the longest by innings since All-Star games began in 1933; it would be tied in 2008, at Yankee Stadium, the AL prevailing, 4-3.)
I drained my beer, left my last quarter on the bar, and walked happily, and a bit unsteadily, out into the late night.
Now, 57 years later, Dick Allen, the “strongest man in baseball,” as Tony Kubek described him during that All-Star broadcast, is taking his rightful place in the Hall of Fame. I hope his family decides to have a Phillies “P” on the cap of his Hall of Fame plaque.
Russ Walsh is a retired teacher, baseball coach, and writer living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He is a lifelong and long-suffering Philadelphia Phillies fan. He writes for the Society for American Baseball Research and for his blog The Faith of a Phillies Fan. You can contact him through X (formerly known as Twitter) at @faithofaphilli1.
Cleaning Up
More About Dick Allen
Maybe if the Phillies had called me in, man to man, like the Dodgers had done with Jackie Robinson, and said, “Dick, this is what we have in mind. It’s going to be very difficult but we’re with you”—at least I would have been prepared.—Dick Allen, who grew up in an integrated Pennsylvania hamlet, remembering the Phillies sending him to their Little Rock, Arkansas AAA farm team in 1963 . . . where he got his first direct and bitter experience with the South’s institutional racism.
He did a real fine job for me. He had a great year, led our team in RBIs, and he never gave me any trouble . . . He was great in our clubhouse. He got along with everybody. He wasn’t a rah-rah guy, but he came to play. They respected him, and they liked him.—Red Schoendienst, Hall of Fame manager, who managed Allen as a Cardinal in 1970.
He was the greatest player I ever managed, and what he did for us in Chicago was amazing . . . Dick was the leader of our team, the captain, the manager on the field. He took care of the young kids, took them under his wing. And he played every game as if it was his last day on earth . . . He played hurt for us so many times that they thought he was Superman. But he wasn’t; he was human. If anything, he was hurting himself trying to come back too soon.—Chuck Tanner, who managed Allen on the White Sox in 1972-1974.
[C]hoosing to vote for him means focusing on that considerable peak while giving him the benefit of the doubt on the factors that shortened his career. From here, the litany is sizable enough to justify that. Allen did nothing to deserve the racism and hatred he battled in Little Rock and Philadelphia, or the condescension of the lily-white media that refused to even call him by his correct name. To underplay the extent to which those forces shaped his conduct and his public persona thereafter is to hold him to an impossibly high standard; not everyone can be Jackie Robinson or Ernie Banks. The distortions that influenced the negative views of him . . . were damaging. To give them the upper hand is to reject honest inquiry into his career.—Jay Jaffe, in The Cooperstown Casebook.
Extra Innings
Dick Allen’s Rookie of the Year campaign in 1964 ended with the infamous “Phillie Phlop,” the team’s pennant race collapse after all but running away with the National League pennant. The Phlop was far from Allen’s fault: his slash line during the Phlop—.441/.457/.659. (OPS: 1.106.)
Allen’s first and last major league home runs were on the 17th of a month. The first—April 17, 1964, off Cubs lefthander Dick Ellsworth. The last—May 17th, 1977, off Yankees lefthander Ron Guidry.
None of the Dick Allen reports mentions that he was traded to Atlanta by Philadelphia but refused to report over alleged racism concerns. That was around the time the city had a Jewish mayor (Sam Massell) and Hank Aaron was entrenched as a future Hall of Famer.
Great story Russ!