The 2007 and 2008 New York Mets did the Phillies - and perhaps Dick Allen - a huge favor by managing to collapse two years in a row, thus paving the way for the Phillies to win the World Series last season. The Mets officially have erased the stigma once attached to the Phils' 1964 flameout.
For years, that disaster has been melded in the minds of local fans with the six-year train wreck of Allen's first tenure in Philadelphia. It's time to admit what we've always known: Dick Allen belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Richard Anthony "Dick" Allen - he didn't care for "Richie," which he never hesitated to tell sportswriters, though some persist in calling him that - was one of the most talented players ever. One of his harshest critics, baseball analyst Bill James, called him "probably the most gifted baseball player that I've ever seen."
In fact, Allen's talent transcended baseball. George Will once told me: "I was at Princeton's graduate school 1964-67. Probably in 1966 or 1967 I attended a party where I conversed with Princeton's basketball coach, Butch van Breda Kolff. I asked him - he was fresh from the delights of coaching Bill Bradley - who was the finest basketball talent he had ever seen. I thought he might say Oscar Robertson. But without a moment of hesitation he said, 'A high school student from Wampum, Pennsylvania - Richie Allen.' "
Allen's talent was prodigious. In an era when pitchers dominated, Allen hit 351 home runs. Orlando Cepeda, a contemporary of Allen's ushered into the hall in 1999, hit 379 - but batted nearly 1,400 more times than Allen. Another contemporary who made the Hall of Fame was Harmon Killebrew; Allen outhit him, .292 to .256; won three slugging titles to Killebrew's one; and hit more doubles and triples than Killebrew while batting about 2,500 fewer times.
Let's put his career in perspective: From 1964 through 1972, Allen was the best hitter in baseball. He may be more than just a player who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. At his peak, he might have been better than any other player - Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose not excepted - who doesn't have a plaque in Cooperstown. He was a much better player than Jim Rice, who was voted in this year.
Unfortunately, Allen was also what William C. Kashatus, author of September Swoon: Richie Allen, the '64 Phillies, and Racial Integration, called "the wrong player in the wrong place at the wrong time." The long, rancorous history of Allen's relationships with an all-white Philadelphia press - most notably Bill Conlin and Larry Merchant, the latter regarded by many of the Phillies as a "throat-cutter" - was summed up best by Kashatus in comments to me: "Dick had a very undeserved reputation as a malcontent. For his first seven seasons, he clashed with the Philadelphia press, the toughest in the country, and the fans believed what they read. The fact is that nearly all of Allen's teammates and managers liked him and regarded him as a hugely valuable player."
The incident that most defined Allen's war with the local press was his fight with teammate Frank Thomas in 1965, a clash sparked by Thomas' racial gibes, which Philadelphia sportswriters, particularly Merchant, vehemently denied at the time. Thomas, an aging and unproductive player, was subsequently sold. No matter how well Allen played after that, he was subjected to lethal booing, not just in Philadelphia and much of it tinged with racial slurs.
Allen is now the first to acknowledge that he did not handle the jeers from fans and press well but moped and sulked and got distracted, missing practices and even showing up late for games. As early as spring 1965, he was drinking heavily. In his 1989 autobiography, Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen, written with Tim Whitaker, he talked about a spring-training game with the Yankees in which a sliding Mickey Mantle collided with him at third base: "When the dust finally settles, the ump looks down at both of us sprawled on the ground and shakes his head. 'I've never smelled so much booze in my life,' he tells me and Mantle. 'Get off your asses before you set each other on fire.' "
For some reason, many have forgotten that Allen came back to the Phillies for the 1975 and '76 seasons, urged by, among others, Mike Schmidt and Rich (that's what he told me he wanted to be called) Ashburn. In a story several years ago for Philadelphia Magazine, Ashburn was emphatic: "There were absolutely no hard feelings toward Dick by the team, the front office, and, to be honest, the fans. It was pretty obvious by then that everything had cooled off, and we all wanted him to succeed."
Allen and the Phillies organization have long since let bygones be bygones, and we now have a pretty good idea that much of the disruption credited to Allen with the Phillies and other teams that he played for in the 1970s were misunderstandings or misinterpretations. Allen, on the basis of his on-field performance, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. The Red Sox, for Gawd's sake, got Rice in. Can we start the bandwagon rolling?
Allen Barra, who grew up in Collingswood, writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book is "Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee."
