ALL IN FOR ALLEN?

               I was surfing the web the other day and came across a story about Dick Allen, the former baseball player. It made me think about, uh, Dick Allen.

               The piece said that Allen, one of the leading batsmen of his era (1963-77), was a good bet to win election to the game’s Hall of Fame when one of the hall’s several veterans’ committees meets again next year. It noted that in 2014, the last time the group met, Allen was named on the ballots of 11 of the 16 electors, men who played or were otherwise connected with the game during his service. That was just one vote short of success, and the odds were that this obstacle would be overcome the next time around.

               The information made me gulp a bit because Allen looked like anything but a Hall shoo-in when his memory was more vivid in my mind, or that, I daresay, of most of the sporting public. While he was a helluva hitter (a career 351 home runs and .292 batting average at a time that included the Second Dead Ball Era because of pitcher domination) he also performed amid constant turmoil, much of it of his own making.  Sensitive, moody and confrontational, and chafing under the residues of racism in the game and society, he left a trail of hard feelings wherever he played. Evidence of that was the fact that in 15 years on the sportswriters’ Hall of Fame ballot ending in 1997 he never received as much as 19% of the vote, far less than the 75% required for entrance. Those elections are, in part, popularity contests, and popular Allen wasn’t.

               Allen played before I became a sportswriter, so I can’t testify as one, but I do have a couple of memories of him. The first stemmed from a game I attended when Allen was with the Chicago White Sox. I can’t recall the date or even the year-- 1972, ’73 or ’74-- but I think the foe was the New York Yankees. I was sitting with my kids in a Comiskey Park box seat just to the right of home plate when Allen connected with a fastball, his bat emitting a sound that was qualitatively different from others of its sort. The ball started low and then soared like a jet plane on takeoff, and while it probably violates some law of physics I swear it was still rising when it cleared the left field wall some 370 feet away. I’ve never seen a ball hit harder.

               Years later, in 1989, I spent a day with Allen in Chicago while he was publicizing his autobiography “Crash; The Life and Times of Dick Allen,” which the ballplayer authored with writer Tim Whitaker. Allen, me and our driver attended a couple of book-store signings, had lunch, and sat in on a local radio talk show, where he answered caller’s questions.

  That day he was the soul of affability, signing everything that was thrust before him, adding inscriptions when asked and assuring one and all that Chicago was his kind of town. “I only wish I’d started and ended my career here,” he smilingly repeated.  It might have pointed out that he could have ended it there if he chose; the White Sox made him baseball’s highest-paid player at $250,000 a year over his three-year stint and he was well liked by the fans, unlike those of cantankerous Philadelphia, where he got his start, but courtesy prevailed

 Truth was, though, he walked out on the team without explanation with two weeks to go in the 1974 season. When the walk-out finally came up on the call-in show he treated it summarily, saying “It’s a long story. It’s in the book.  It was about baseball.” It was in the book, but it was a short story and it wasn’t only about baseball. A sportswriter’s pesty questions, a dispute with a teammate, and a manager he said he admired (Chuck Tanner) reminding him that he—the manager—was running things and a baseball paradise turned into a purgatory. The book tells pretty much the same story about the other stops in Allen’s five-team, 15-season career.   

That Allen was an excellent player is beyond dispute. Average sized at a listed 5-foot-11 and 190 pounds, he was so strong-armed and deep-chested he could twirl his huge (42-ounce)bat like a majorette’s baton.  He won a Rookie of the Year award in one league (with the NL Phillies in 1964) and an MVP in the other, with the AL White Sox in ’72. He was a good fielder at first base and a canny base runner, and even could bunt, as he once did to foil a Nolan Ryan no-hitter bid. Many players with whom he performed said he was a good teammate, although it should be noted that athletes will put up with a lot from immensely talented colleagues.

The other hand, though, was more like a catcher’s mitt. Allen missed practices and games and sometimes stopped at what his book called “watering holes” (i.e., bars) en route to games. His clubhouse brawl with Phillie teammate Frank Thomas remains notable; pro athletes rarely go at it seriously. Nobody was photographed smoking cigarettes in uniform as often as Allen; indeed, a picture of him doing just that adorns the cover of his book.

Allen said that, maybe, the cover picture wasn’t a good idea, reinforcing the notion that he was a rebel without much cause. He said he also didn’t much care for the book’s title, which derived from his habit, begun in Philadelphia where fans sometimes threw things at him, of wearing a batting helmet in the field. Phillie teammates dubbed him “Crash Helmet,” later shortening it to “Crash,” and the name stuck.

“I didn’t crash. I’m here and doing well,” the trim, then-47-year-old told me. “I think a better title would have been ‘Rules.’ “

“Rules?”

“Yeah. People always said there was one set of rules for me and another for the other players. Sometimes there was, but not in ways people thought.

“Take the Thomas fight. He broke the players’ rule by swinging a bat at me, but the Philly fans blamed me. Other players smoked and drank but only I was abused for it. And that stuff about calling me ‘Richie’ [a name he disliked] early on. No other player got hassled about his first name.”

If the reports are correct, baseball is ready to let bygones be long gone for the now-77-year-old Allen, and probably for the better. If he gets a plaque in Cooperstown, you can bet it’ll say “Dick” instead of “Richie.”