Phillies legend Dick Allen should finally reach the Hall of Fame

The 18th time's the charm: Snubbed by writers for 15 years and twice by committees, this latest collection of sages can undo decades of injustice to a rebel judged too harshly because of his color.

Dick Allen, who was the 1964 National League Rookie of the Year with the Phillies and the 1972 American League MVP with the Chicago White Sox.Read moreCHARLES FOX / MCT

by Marcus Hayes | Columnist

Published Dec. 6, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

I’ve been in Philadelphia for almost 30 years. I’ve covered the Phillies for more than 20. I’ve never written about Dick Allen’s candidacy for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, because its truth has always been self-evident.

Allen belongs, and it’s not really debatable. He never had a chance in his 15 years of eligibility (it’s 10 years these days), and he barely missed when baseball tried to wash away its shame. Baseball and Allen have another chance Sunday, when the 16-member Classic Baseball Era Committee convenes in Dallas to vote on eight candidates.

Each member gets three votes. Allen needs 75%, or 12 votes. He got 11 the last two times such a committee voted.

The results will be announced Jan. 25.

Let’s get it right this time, folks.

I’ve avoided the Dick Allen argument for decades because it’s not much of an argument; rather, it’s an indictment of an age in which color mattered more than accomplishment. It’s an exhausting endeavor, trying to reverse racism and explain advanced statistical values, often to the same demographic that has kept Allen out of the Hall.

In an era when newspapers dominated the branding of athletes on the American sports scene, Allen was cast as a malcontent and a rascal. Why? Chiefly, because he got angry and stayed angry with the way he was treated by a city, country, and league that had bigotry ingrained into its DNA.

Certainly, Allen was imperfect: He cared little for the opinion of others and less for curfews. He missed games with small thought to the effect, dared his handlers to discipline him, and was staggeringly unprofessional in magnitudes that would make Allen Iverson shudder. Still, far worse rascals have skated into the Hall.

Allen Iverson produced. So did Dick Allen.

But Allen Iverson produced in an era of waning ignorance and intolerance. He was his unique self, unapologetically, and he benefited from the trials of Dick Allen and that generation.

By contrast, Dick Allen was a Black man rebelling in a white game in the middle of the civil rights movement — a time of race riots in Philadelphia and Detroit and Newark, N.J., just months before I was born there — his brand of rebellion made him more villain than rebel. Since he often was rude to white baseball writers, and since the Phillies in particular mismanaged the controversies in which Allen found himself embroiled, the straw-man arguments regarding his actual body of work served as a barricade to his admittance.

Hall candidates need 75% of qualified voters in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America to vote for them in their window of candidacy. Allen never got more than 18.9%, and that came in 1996, the 14th of his 15 eligible years on the writers’ ballot. He got 16.7% the next year, a bit less than hit-by-pitch artist Minnie Minoso.

It was an impossible mountain for Allen to climb with giants in his path.

The late Bill Conlin, a former beat writer and columnist in Philadelphia, was his most thorough biographer, and he christened Allen the “Sultan of Sulk.” Baseball stats god and historian Bill James once ranked Allen the second-most controversial ballplayer in history ... ahead of both Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who were banned for life for gambling transgressions. James has been a staunch anti-Allen lobbyist, but then, James also once opined that players are no more integral to the game than are beer vendors, and once ran a Twitter poll to see how many voters thought the woman accusing future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault was lying (he quickly deleted it).

So you see what Allen was up against.

Time tints harsh memories with a sepia tone, and Allen eventually mellowed, but he has failed to overcome himself with two Golden Eras Committees. He fell one vote short in 2014. Allen then died in 2020. He fell one vote short a year later, in 2021. At least he didn’t have to suffer the pain of rejection again.

The standards in Allen’s era weren’t just double standards, they were 10 times standards. Not only did Black players have to be exponentially more talented and skilled, they had to be exponentially more gracious and exponentially more mature and exponentially more patient. Allen qualified only in the first category.

That, at this point, should be enough.

In addition to Allen, the committee — six Hall of Famers, five executives, and five writer types — will consider the candidacies of (alphabetically): Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant.

My three votes would be for Allen, Tiant, and Harris, a Negro Leagues legend. I could be argued out of Tiant and Harris, but not Allen. He was just too good.

Allen played in cavernous parks, which hurt his numbers. Nevertheless, among players with at least 7,000 plate appearances in the modern era (since 1901), his on-base plus slugging (OPS) of .912 ranks 36th, and his home run total of 351 is 94th. Those rankings are merely outstanding.

However, when the ballparks are factored in — a stat called OPS-plus, or adjusted OPS — Allen ranks 11th, at 156. That ranks No. 1 among players who played when he played, from 1963 to 1977. That group includes Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Michael Jack Schmidt.

Does that mean Allen is as worthy as Mays, Aaron, and Schmidt? No. But he’s a damn sight more worthy than, say, White Sox sphinx Harold Baines.

There are plenty of other stats to support Allen’s candidacy.

From 1964 to 1974, only Aaron had a better OPS than Allen’s .940; Frank Robinson was a distant third, 26 points behind. Allen’s 165 OPS-plus led Aaron and Robinson by six points. Allen’s 319 homers and .386 on-base percentage ranked fourth, his 975 RBIs ranked seventh, his 110 steals ranked 10th. He was intentionally walked 132 times, which ranked fifth.

He did this in the golden age of pitching.

Since 1920, the beginning of the “live ball era,” the lowest league-average ERAs came in 1967, 1968, and 1972.

Allen, in his fourth full season with the Phillies, led the National League with a .970 OPS in 1967. He was just getting started.

With the White Sox in 1972, Allen led the American League with 37 home runs, 113 RBIs, an 8.6 wins above replacement (WAR), and walks. He led the major leagues with a 1.023 OPS, and won the AL MVP award.

In all, nine of the top 18 live-ball seasons happened during Allen’s prime. He was at his best against the best.

You can reasonably argue that, for 11 seasons, Allen was the most feared hitter in baseball. With that said, you cannot reasonably argue that he does not belong in the Hall of Fame.