On Seeing Dick Allen Go Deep in an All-Star Game
And, a calm argument on behalf of All-Star reform.
Pregame Pepper
. . . Newly-elected Hall of Famer Dick Allen was a seven-time All-Star—three times as a Phillie, once as a Cardinal, and three times with the White Sox.
. . . Allen’s fellow newly-elected Hall of Famer, the late Dave Parker, was also a seven-time All-Star—four times as a Pirate, twice as a Red, and once as a Brewer.
. . . The players with the most All-Star Games played are Hall of Famers Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, and Stan Musial—with 24 All-Star Games each. Mays has the most plate appearances of any All-Star with 82.
. . . The second-most All-Star Games played also belong to three Hall of Famers—Cal Ripken, Jr., Brooks Robinson, and Ted Williams, each with 18.
. . . Thirteen Hall of Famers were in the starting lineups for the 1967 All-Star Game: Aaron, Allen, Robinson, Lou Brock, Rod Carew, Orlando Cepeda, Roberto Clemente, Juan Marichal, Bill Mazeroski, Tony Oliva, Tony Perez, Joe Torre, and Carl Yastrzemski.
. . . Emmett Ashford (AL) became the first African-American to umpire in an All-Star Game: he was the left field line umpire for the 1967 game, a year after he became the first African-American major league umpire at all.
Leading Off
Seeing Dick Allen Play in an All-Star Game
Play, and smash a long home run in the bargain.
By Russ Walsh
Author’s Note: On July 27 this year, Dick Allen will be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. The recognition is richly deserved and tragically overdue. Allen died of cancer in in 2020 at the age of 78, after he had been denied admittance to the Hall by one vote in 2014.
His friend and teammate, Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt long lobbied for Allen’s place in the Hall. Noting the racism Allen endured in his career, Schmidt said, “ [T]hese [negative] labels have kept Dick Allen out of the Hall of Fame. Imagine what Dick could have accomplished in another era, on another team, free to hone his skills, to be confident, to come to the ballpark each day and just play ball.”
The story below is a remembrance of one of the times that Dick Allen made an impact on my life as a lifelong Phillies fan.
In the summer of 1967, during the break between my sophomore and junior years of college, I was sharing a basement apartment on New Hampshire Ave. in Washington, DC, with my good buddy from high school, Bruce Ingraham. The apartment wasn’t much, but it had the distinct advantage of being a half block from Dupont Circle, the very heart of the youth culture of 1960s Washington, often called the Greenwich Village of DC.
At any time of the day or night on the Circle you could hear folk music, jazz, bluegrass, or Caribbean and African rhythms, or listen to a group of people protesting the Vietnam War or debating civil rights issues, or the latest William Burroughs novel. You could get a good high by just breathing in the “grass” fumes as you walked across the circle.
DC also had the advantage of having a 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 ordering 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 still-brand new Anaheim Stadium, home of the California Angels. I hadn’t missed an All-Star Game in at least 10 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, as one might expect, of a place named after a tavern in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a ship’s galley. It hosted an eclectic mix of patrons ranging from beat poets to rednecks, students to businessmen, gay liberationists to motorcycle gang members. Most importantly, at the moment, 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 center field. Tony Oliva (Twins), playing centerfield, raced back and then gave up as the ball disappeared over the fence.
The announcer was gobsmacked that Allen could hit that pitch that far.
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 in those days an American League town, 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 home run stood up until the bottom of the sixth, when Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson (Orioles) took Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins (Cubs, ex-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. Lefthander Chris Short (Phillies) entered the game in the ninth inning, and 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 shortstop Jim Fregosi (Angels).
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 Tony Perez (Reds) connected against Hall of Famer Catfish Hunter (Kansas City Athletics). The Mets's Rookie of the Year in the making, Tom Seaver, came on in the bottom of the twelfth and worked around a one out walk to Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski (Red Sox), to lock down the National League victory.
I drained my beer, left my last quarter on the bar, and walked happily, if a bit unsteadily, out into the late night.
The 15-inning game was the longest game by innings since All-Star games began in 1933. That record was tied in 2008 when the game at Yankee Stadium also went for 15 innings with the American League prevailing 4-3. Both the 1966 and 1967 All-Star games finished with a 2-1 score, and both went into extra innings.
The lowest scoring All-Star game ever played happened one year later in 1968. That game ended 1-0, with Willie Mays scoring on a groundout in the first inning for the only run of the game.
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 MLBReport.com. You can contact him through X (formerly known as Twitter) at @faithofaphilli1.
Cleaning Up
Let Us Think of All-Star Reform
As in, how the All-Star Game’s rosters are composed.
By Jeff Kallman
I should have seen it coming the moment Clayton Kershaw froze Vinny Capra in the dry ice of his slider to join the 3,000 K Club. Commissioner Rob Manfred was going to use his privilege of an All-Star Legacy Pick to place Kershaw onto his eleventh All-Star roster—whether or not Kershaw’s season otherwise suggested he deserved to be there this time around.
Kershaw’s always been one of baseball’s class acts in hand with one of its greatest pitchers ever. But even he’s only human. Even he shows his age. Even he knows the 2025 he’s having so far, returning mid-May after injury rehab, wouldn’t have landed anyone else near the All-Star Game except as a spectator.
Even he knows that his true immortality will begin with his induction into the Hall of Fame in due course.
“You never take for granted getting to go to an All-Star game,” he said to the Associated Press before the Dodgers played the Brewers in Milwaukee Monday. “Obviously, I don’t deserve to get to go this season. I haven’t pitched very much. I didn’t really know [the Legacy Pick] was a thing. At the end of the day, it’s weird, but it’s cool, so I’m just going to enjoy it.”
Kershaw becomes Manfred’s third Legacy Pick, after Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols a few years ago. It wasn’t their fault, and it isn’t Kershaw’s fault that something like the Legacy Pick exists in the first place. And while you can argue (with archives of evidence) that Manfred’s wreaked enough mischief during his tenure, give him his propers, folks: he didn’t exactly invent the idea of the legacy choice.
Quick: How many times have we fumed because one, two, three or more should-have-been All-Stars got snubbed because someone—fans, others responsible for filling out the All-Star rosters—decided Headsup Harry Hambomber on the threshold of the end should get one more moment under the (All) Stars? (You may remember Yankee fans praying for one more Derek Jeter All-Star nod on behalf of his entire career, not how he was doing the season he made it his last.)
Or, because a whole gang of someones decided to stuff the ballot boxes out of somewhere on behalf of some team? I haven’t heard of any ballot-box stuffing this time around (yet) but knowing too much about the 1957 Cincinnati stuffing scandal (which cost all fans the All-Star vote for over a decade) and the surrealistically transparent Kansas City stuffing of 2015, I’m not exactly going to dismiss it, anymore.
In fact, I’m going to go back out on a limb I’ve occupied before with no fear of being sawn off: The All-Star Game should be about excellence, not bias, conspiracy, or “legacies.” Kershaw, Cabrera, and Pujols are going to get their proper legacy picks in due course. Maybe you’ve heard of them. They’re called plaques in Cooperstown.
Everybody with me? So far, so good. Now to revisit some proposals I’ve made in print in the recent past but have had no sane reason to change.
1) Remodel the All-Star Ballot—Why not let the statisticians from such eminent repositories as Baseball Reference, the Elias Sports Bureau, FanGraphs, Retrosheet, and STATS, Inc., determine a five candidate per position All-Star ballot? Almost by implication, they’d choose the five absolute most worthy All-Stars at each field position plus designated hitter. It’s their very mission to know who’s really producing and who’s really reducing.
It would sure beat the living daylights out of baseball’s current mandate of each team represented on the ballot at each position.
2) One Fan, One Vote, One Time—This multiple-vote shtusim needs to stop. What is this, the All-Star Game or elections in Tammany New York, Daley Machine Chicago, or Prendergast Machine Kansas City? Keep the vote online only. Make it one vote, one time for fans. Develop the necessary applications and safeguards to block fans from voting more than once. And make it so that All-Star voting can be at home, only. No voting in the public library or the Net café (yes, they still have those) allowed. Just in case.
3) Join Together—Combine that fan vote with one-person, one-vote, one-time voting from the people who, you know, actually play and know the game: the players, the coaches, the managers. Let’s have an All-Star Game the way we think it used to be: as the closest you can get to a complete showcase for the best baseball has to offer. (And no more letting the All-Star Game serve as a lifetime achievement award. Baseball already has a lifetime achievement award, to which many aspire but very few, still, truly earn. It’s called Hall of Fame enshrinement.)
3) Darn That Derby. I’ve argued in the past, too, that the Home Run Derby has a 50-50 chance of leaving its participants weaker after it than they were going into it. Aaron Judge himself hit it right on the screws when he once said it’s far more important that your team wins on the season and has a shot at the postseason than whether you or any of your teammates join or win a Derby. Regardless of the prize money.
Is the Home Run Derby fun? Please. Everyone gets a charge out of it, at least until Sir Loin of Beef pulls his groin while hitting his 45th BP satellite toward the Milky Way. Joe and Jane Fan love it. The television cameras love it. Enough writers love it. (Kershaw’s kids love it, or were you out of the room when daughter Cali Ann charmed a TV audience by chanting on behalf of then-Dodger Joc Pederson?) But guess who’s going to be first on the kvetch count when the Derby winner or the other Derby swingers come up lesser or slower in the season’s second half. There are enough teams whose fan bases swear the season’s lost over one bad inning . . . in April.
Unfortunately, without the number one change that must be made, and not just on behalf of the All-Star Game, the foregoing means three things: nada, void, and bupkis. That change is, of course . . .
4) Be Gone, Satanic In-season Interleague Play! At long enough last. The damn gimmick has outlived its usefulness no matter how many Yankees-Mets/Dodgers-Angels/Cubs-White Sox games provoke noisy discussions, sad laughs (if you’ve seen the White Sox lately), and possible brawls in the stands for the click bait shops. And who wants a bad interleague matchup possibly meaning the difference in one or the other team’s pennant race prayers? (Do you really think it’s right that the fate of the Phillies in the NL East might, maybe, depend on their chances against . . . the AL Central Twins, whom they play to finish the regular season?)
Not to mention . . . well, let’s face it. Those three rivalries above might be fun for about five minutes compared to the eternal sunshines of the splattered minds known as the Yankees-Red Sox, the Dodgers-Giants, the Cubs-Cardinals, the Mets-Braves, the Phillies-Nationals. Those rivalries aren’t just a lot of bragging rights blather. They’re blood feuds. They make the ancient Hatfields-McCoys feud resemble a tea shoppe cribbage contest.
Maybe baseball will have to expand to make the death of regular-season interleague play imminent. Well, would it be that terrible to invite Montreal back to the National League’s party? (The condition: finding owners willing to build a decent ballpark without trying to soak the public.) Would it be horrible to award Portland, Oregon an American League team?
Or, would it be that terrible to disappear a particularly underachieving, undernourished, underaccountable team? Better be careful there. We may already have one foot across the line separating blasphemy from heresy without that idea.
Jeff Kallman edits the Wednesday and Thursday editions of Here’s the Pitch. You can reach him at easyace1955@outlook.com or easyace1955@gmail.com. A very few portions of the foregoing essay have been published elsewhere.
Extra Innings
Know Your Editors
Here’s the Pitch is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@outlook.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.