A lot can happen in 3 years. 3 years ago I started the below blog post and for whatever reason left it in draft status. Earlier this month I saw
this announcement on the Baseball Hall of Fame website. Seeing that Chicago White Sox legend Dick Allen was again being considered for enshrinement made me want to do something on his behalf. Then, I remembered I already did, well at least I started. A lot can happen in 3 years.
Aside from correcting multiple grammar and spelling errors, the de-mothballed post is the same as when I started it three years ago. The only exception is that I have color-coded the first three paragraphs, put important statements in bold, and italicized the entire tome (Not Jim Tome; that's a Hall of Famer of a different spelling). The green indicates that the statements are still valid some 1100 days later. The red indicates they are not. I'll be back at the end to further my point.
Dear White Sox Organization: First and foremost, I would like to wish you a joyous and happy holiday season. Secondly, I would like to congratulate you on the fine baseball season you just finished. It is truly an exciting time to be a White Sox fan. I have been a Sox fan going on 50 years. I can not emphasize enough how the accomplishments of one player brought me into the White Sox fan base. A player who sadly I don't think your organization has spent enough time heralding his accomplishments while on the South Side. This player is no other than Dick Allen, The 1972 AL MVP in his first year for the White Sox.
There are two things I'd like to see the Sox organization do to honor Mr. Allen's legacy. The first is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his MVP season in 2022. The impact of Dick Allen on the White Sox is legend. He revitalized the team mobilized the fan base and squashed all the talk of moving the franchise from Chicago to Florida. His homers at Old Comiskey Park especially those rooftop shots are why a 7-year-old boy raised to be a Cubs fan flipped allegiances and spent his days wanting to emulate his new heroes like Bill Melton, Wilbur Wood, Bucky Dent, Jorge Orta, and especially Allen himself.
I hope you guys have something like this in mind because a celebration on the scale that I'm thinking should have been planned years in advance.
Secondly, I would love to see the White Sox publicly champion the HOF candidacy for Mr. Allen. In my opinion, Allen is the most deserving player in White Sox history for enshrinement in Cooperstown. Actually, I believe he is the most deserving former player in the entire league who is not yet been voted in. I was very happy when Minnie Minoso got in this year on the Golden Days Era Ballot..This may seem like blasphemy at 35th and Shields but I feel Allen is more deserving than Minoso for a spot in Cooperstown. I understand that looking at the advanced metrics bears my thoughts out. I was heartbroken when Allen missed out by 1 vote again this year. He now has to wait 5 more years before his case can be reviewed again.
A lot of this heavy lifting needs to be done by Allen's first team the Phillies. He played the brunt of his career there and I am glad to see that there is a greater acknowledgment of the racism he endured while in Philadelphia. What I ask of the White Sox is that in the next 5 years, they begin stating Allen's case every time they have the opportunity. There are still very many White Sox fans of my generation and the generation previous to mine who understand the impact Dick Allen had for the Southsiders in the early 70's. I ask that the management of the Sox while continuing to look to the future and endeavoring to bring more pennants and World Series championships to their fan base also look back at the past especially the accomplishments of Allen and celebrate what he brought to the team and lobby for his accomplishments to be recognized and honored by the powers that be at Cooperstown and beyond.
A few years back Jerry Reinsdorf lobbied hard for the HOF candidacy of Harold Baines. I have long been a proponent of Baine's inclusion in Cooperstown. Reinsdorf did the right thing by helping make the case for Baines. Reinsdorf had seen firsthand the impact of Baines on the White Sox and knew in his heart that Baines was HOF material. Dick Allen was long gone when Reinsdorf became owner of the Sox. Reinsdorf and the White Sox need to understand that although they did not experience it Allen's impact on the White Sox and on baseball in that era was actually far greater than the impact Baines had. Baines had HOF teammates like Carlton Fisk and Frank Thomas.
That is where I left things off in 2021
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Dick Allen (Circa 1965)
Public Domain |
Here in the present (11/23/24) Dick Allen is a candidate once again for the enshrinement in Cooperstown that eluded him in his lifetime. Having missed out on the highest individual honor in baseball by only 1 vote in his last 2 elections, he again is considered a front-runner. This year he is joined by Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Harris, and Luis Tiant. All these players are certainly worthy of consideration, and many deserve their own plaque in Cooperstown. I would still argue that none of these players are more deserving than Allen.
On December 8th a 16-member Hall of Fame Panel will convene at the Baseball Winter Meetings to decide if any of these players will make it for 2025. Anyone receiving 12 votes or more from the committee will become a Hall of Famer. Anyone who doesn't will have to wait until 2028 to even be considered to be a finalist again. Dick Allen shouldn't have to wait that long.
He actually shouldn't have had to wait this long. Allen was not the malcontent nor rabble-rouser that people portrayed him as. He had been vindicated from most of that in his lifetime. Some of it remains from the atmosphere of racism that followed his career and his BBWAA-era candidacy. If you're not aware of Allen's experiences as the first professional black baseball player in then-segregated Little Rock, Arkansas while a Phillies farmhand in 1963, this
article is a good place to start. Moving to Philadelphia in 1964 and having one of the greatest rookie seasons in MLB history, didn't stop the unfair treatment. He wasn't allowed 548to go by his preferred name Dick but was relegated to becoming the diminutive Richie, a move which can only be construed now some 60 years later as a thinly veiled attempt to keep him in his place.
His place is in the Hall of Fame. Yes, injuries shortened his career and certainly, he would have been helped by a longer body of work, but what a body of work. The 7-time all-star, according to Baseball Musings, Day by Day database the 1964 Rookie of the Year and 1972 MVP in his first 6 seasons (1964-1969) was ranked 20th in at-bats. but ranked higher in 9 other offensive categories including 5th in runs, 3rd in triples, 8th in both home runs and RBI, 9th in walks, 10th in batting average, and 1st in slugging percentage. Allen's slugging percentage was .555 in that 6-year time. Here is a list of the 10 fellows directly behind him.
Frank Robinson .552 HOF
Willie McCovey .551 HOF
Hank Aaron .548 HOF
Willie Mays .539 HOF
Harmon Killebrew .535 HOF
Roberto Clemente .511 HOF
Willie Stargell .510 HOF
Reggie Jackson .508 HOF
Carl Yaztrzemski .507 HOF
Ron Santo .505 HOF
This is just one example of Allen's on-field accomplishments putting him among the elite players of his generation. Allen is also revered by many players who played alongside him. One is Hall of Famer Allen's former White Sox teammate Rich Gossage. I'm going to end this post with a quote from Gossage for a
2014 USA Today article about Allen and the Hall of Fame. Goose puts it more eloquently than I ever could.
"I've been around the game a long time,'' Hall of Fame pitcher Goose Gossage tells USA TODAY Sports, "and he's the greatest player I've ever seen play in my life. He had the most amazing season (1972) I've ever seen. He's the smartest baseball man I've ever been around in my life.
"He taught me how to pitch from a hitter's perspective, and taught me how to play the game, and how to play the game right. There's no telling the numbers this guy could have put up if all he worried about was stats.
"The guy belongs in the Hall of Fame.''
