From Wampum, Pa., to the Hall of Fame, Dick Allen’s power was always on display.
By Steve Wulf
It takes six hours and 52 minutes to drive the 444.8 miles from Wampum, Pa., to Cooperstown, N.Y. That journey is nothing, though, compared to the odyssey that Dick Allen embarked upon when he left Wampum, a small town northwest of Pittsburgh, after Philadelphia Phillies scout Jack Ogden signed him out of high school in 1960.
In between then and this past December, when the Hall of Fame’s Classic Baseball Era Committee elected Allen, the seven-time All-Star forged a legend as the Hercules of baseball, a man who could belittle colossal stadiums with his 42-ounce bat, run the bases as if he were a sprite and pass on his incredible grasp of the game to others. And like Hercules, he was given a series of labors to overcome — prejudice, a cage match, a series of career-threatening injuries, thrown beer bottles, misunderstandings and his own set of demons.
Cancer claimed Allen’s life on Dec. 7, 2020, four years and one day before his family and admirers got the news they had long been waiting for. Right after the announcement, Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, a Philly native, interrupted his own press conference to sing Allen’s praises.
Allen’s numbers were epic. He was among the top players in the game in several seasons, including his 1964 National League Rookie of the Year campaign and his 1972 American League Most Valuable Player Award effort.
Hall of Fame pitcher Rich Gossage (2008) had this to say about the committee’s selections: “I played 22 seasons, with nine teams and a lot of Hall of Famers, and I consider Dick and (fellow electee) Dave (Parker) to be among the very best who ever played. I’m sorry it took so long for them to be recognized, especially so for Dick, who didn’t live to see the day. Man, I would not be in Cooperstown myself had it not been for Dick. He was one bad dude, and I mean that in a good way.”
Ferguson Jenkins, inducted in 1991, played with Allen in the Phillies’ minor league system and pitched against him many times. “Dick was a true five-tool player, in the same class as Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and Mickey Mantle,” said Jenkins. “He was just a tremendous athlete.”
Wampum, Pa., established in 1796 as a Native American trading post, had a population of fewer than 1,000 people when Era Allen, a housekeeper, was raising her nine children in the nearby village of Chewton. According to Era, quoted in the excellent 2017 biography, “Dick Allen: The Life and Times of a Baseball Immortal,” written by William Kashatus, the young Dick told her when he was 6 or 7, “I’m going to be a big leaguer someday. I’ll play on TV, make a big salary and buy you a nice house.”
Amazingly enough, the Allen family would produce three big leaguers: Dick; his older brother, Hank; and younger brother, Ron. Dick was the first to make the majors, thanks to a newspaper story about his high school basketball prowess that Ogden had clipped out of the paper because it mentioned Allen was also a power-hitting shortstop. The first time Ogden saw him play, Dick hit two mammoth home runs. As the scout later said: “I’d been looking 30 years for a kid like this, and I wasn’t going to lose him.”
Ogden pulled out all the stops to convince Era that Allen’s future lay in baseball and not college basketball. He brought Negro Leagues legend Judy Johnson along with him on his first visit, promised to sign Hank to a contract and offered Dick a signing bonus of $70,000 —reportedly the highest ever offered to a Black player. The first thing Dick did with the money was buy Era a nice house.
Because it was a town of mill workers, Wampum had neither the time nor the inclination for racial prejudice. And in his first few minor league stops — Elmira (N.Y.), Twin Falls (Idaho) and Williamsport (Pa.) — Allen was welcomed. But then, in 1963, the Phillies sent him to their Triple-A affiliate in Little Rock, Ark. On Opening Night at Ray Winder Stadium, he became one of the first Black players in a professional game in Arkansas. As Allen told Tim Whitaker in “Crash,” the autobiography they wrote together in 1989: “When I arrived at the park, there were people marching around outside with signs. One said, DON’T NEGRO-IZE BASEBALL. Another, N****R GO HOME… Here, in my mind, I thought Jackie Robinson had Negro-ized baseball 16 years earlier.”
Allen batted .289 with 33 homers and 97 RBI in that cauldron of hatred.
Nowadays, the area in northwest Philadelphia where Connie Mack Stadium once stood is occupied by the Deliverance Evangelistic Church and an adjacent seminary school. There’s little to indicate what happened there in 1964.
That was Allen’s rookie season, and the season that truly tested the faith of Phillies fans. He nearly carried the team to its first National League pennant since 1950, leading the league in runs, triples, extra base hits and total bases. Playing the unfamiliar position of third base, he also made a league-leading 41 errors, and demanding fans would ride him for those. At one point in the season, manager Gene Mauch asked, “How can anybody even shape his lips in the form of a boo when a player like Richie Allen comes to bat?”
It certainly wasn’t Allen’s fault that the Phils lost 10 games in a row down the stretch, or that “Richie Allen Night” came off as tone-deaf when it was staged at the halfway point of the streak. Some blamed the fiery Mauch for squeezing the players too hard and shortening the rotation, but there was plenty of fallout to go around.
“To this day,” Allen wrote 25 years later, “I can’t set foot in Philadelphia without somebody asking me about the collapse.”
The whole city was in a foul mood in ’65, and so was Frank Thomas, the aging slugger who was riding the bench on July 3 while Allen was riding high with a .335 average. During batting practice, the two had words. Allen threw a punch, and Thomas hit him on his left shoulder with his bat. It took five Phillies to keep Allen away from Thomas. In the game against the Reds that followed, Allen hit a bases-loaded triple and Thomas a pinch-hit homer, and the two men shook hands. But when the Phillies released Thomas immediately after the game, Allen realized he would be the real fall guy.
“After the Thomas fight,” Allen wrote, “all I wanted to do was go home to Wampum, where the game had been fun.”
Allen did find the solace of home at Fairmount Park, the racetrack outside of Philadelphia. He had spent a lot of time with horses growing up in Chewton, so he kept one at the track, showing up at dawn during homestands to ride Blaze as if he were a jockey like his friend, Angel Cordero. The Phillies didn’t much like it, but it was hard to argue with Allen, who hit 40 home runs with 110 RBI in ’66.
It was another ride that got Dick in trouble the next year. On the rainy night of Aug. 24, 1967, he put his right hand through the front headlight of his stalled 1950 Ford while trying to push it. “On the way to the hospital, all I could think about was what a horrible end this was to my career.” Surgeons worked through the night to repair his hand, but there was no telling if it would ever be the same. When he finally felt ready, he tentatively stepped into a batting cage. The hand hurt, but the thought of not playing again hurt more.
Because Allen could no longer throw the ball effectively, Mauch put him in left field to start the 1968 season. That made him a target for the fans in the left field bleachers. At first, they threw pennies, then bolts, then beer bottles. Allen started wearing a batting helmet in the field, which is how he got the name “Crash” — for crash helmet.
Bob Skinner took over for Mauch midway through the ’68 season, but that failed to spark the Phillies, who finished seventh. When Allen asked Bob Carpenter to trade him, the owner advised him to be patient. The next spring, Skinner moved Allen over to first base, which he liked. As of June 24, he was hitting .318 with 19 homers, but the team was struggling along in fifth place, with a doubleheader scheduled at Shea Stadium. Thinking it was a twi-nighter, Allen decided to stop at Monmouth Park to see one of his thoroughbreds run in the third race. Unfortunately, the starting time of the game had been moved up, and Allen didn’t find out about it until he heard on the car radio that he had been suspended. The suspension lasted 26 days.
Five days after that ’69 season ended, Allen was traded to the Cardinals. In his one season with St. Louis, Allen made the All-Star team and hit 34 homers with 101 RBI. But his reputation had so diminished his value that he was then shipped off to the Dodgers. At first, Allen was thrilled to be wearing the same uniform as his hero, Jackie Robinson, but even he later admitted: “I was off my game.” His numbers weren’t bad: .295 with 23 homers and 90 RBI. But they weren’t what he or the Dodgers expected them to be. And so, he was traded again, this time to the White Sox.
There’s an iconic Sports Illustrated cover, dated June 12, 1972, of Allen juggling three baseballs in the White Sox dugout, with a cigarette dangling underneath his mustache. “SEASON OF SURPRISES,” reads the cover line, followed by “Chicago’s Dick Allen Juggles His Image.” Sitting in the dugout that year was a rookie pitcher named Rich Gossage.
“I had arrived in camp as a non-roster pitcher with a year of Class A under my belt,” Gossage said. “I could throw a ball through a car wash without it getting wet, but I didn’t have a breaking pitch or know anything about baseball. To this day, I thank my lucky stars for the education I got from three people: Chuck Tanner, the manager; Johnny Sain, the pitching coach; and Dick Allen.”
Allen lost half of the ’73 season with a broken leg sustained in a June collision with Angels first baseman Mike Epstein. Then he lost his love for the game in ’74. In the middle of September, while leading the AL in homers with 32, Allen told his teammates that he was retiring. He up and left for his farm outside of Philadelphia. He was 32 years old.
The following spring, Allen had some visitors. Mike Schmidt, Dave Cash and Richie Ashburn came out to the farm in Perkasie to see if he might be interested in coming back to the Phillies. The three Phils — third baseman, second baseman and legend — thought Dick might be just the right ingredient to put the team over the top.
Eventually, the team worked out a deal with the Braves, who had traded for Allen, and on May 14, in a game at Veterans Stadium against the Reds, he made his second Phillies debut. He got a standing ovation when he stepped to the plate and another when he singled. But when he discovered that his power stroke was gone, he took on a new role as a mentor to his younger teammates.
Indeed, the core of the Phillies’ first world championship team in 1980 — Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Garry Maddox, Bob Boone, Larry Bowa, Tim McCarver, Steve Carlton and Tug McGraw — all benefited from Allen’s presence. He wasn’t around, though, having called it quits for good in the middle of his ’77 season with Oakland.
The following years were rough on him — his horse farm burned down and he got divorced. Then in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, 1983, he got just 14 votes out of the 374 cast by the members of the BBWAA. But almost 42 years later, Allen received 13 of a possible 16 votes from the Classic Baseball Era Committee to earn election.
When a player is inducted into the Hall of Fame, he’s pulled in a hundred different directions. Such was the case with Gossage when he was honored at the 2008 Induction Weekend. But for one moment, Dick Allen provided a memory that Gossage will never forget.
“It was after the little golf tournament they have, and I was on the back porch of the Otesaga (Hotel), chatting with people. Someone comes up to me and tells me that there are two gentlemen out front who want to say hello. Doesn’t give me their names, so I’m thinking they’re probably fans wanting an autograph. But I go out to the lobby anyway, and who do I see?
“Chuck Tanner and Dick Allen. Chuck has this big bandage on his neck from the surgery he had just had, and Dick has this big grin on his face. Turns out Dick drove Chuck up from Pittsburgh just to congratulate me. Still makes me tear up.”
Steve Wulf has written about baseball for Sports Illustrated, Time, Life and ESPN.
Reprinted with permission from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
Members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum receive free admission to the Museum, as well as access to exclusive programs, such as the Voices of the Game Series. Additionally, members receive a subscription to the Hall of Fame's bi-monthly magazine, Memories and Dreams, the annual Hall of Fame yearbook and a 10% discount and free shipping on retail purchases. For information on becoming a member, please visit baseballhall.org/join or call 607-547-0397.
