How a high school in Milwaukee advocated for Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame election
Golda Meir High School’s Sports Analytics Club made a Dick Allen performance portfolio. The parent organization sent it to the Hall of Fame committee and believes it could have contributed to his case.
Among the advocates for Dick Allen’s National Baseball Hall of Fame induction is a group of high schoolers from Milwaukee, Wis.
Golda Meir School has offered a Sports Analytics Club since 2022, and for the 2023-24 school year, the members chose to conduct a performance portfolio on Allen and his lack of election to the Hall of Fame.
And now the late Allen will be inducted into the Hall of Fame on Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y. He received one too few votes from the Golden Days Era Committee in both 2014 and 2021, but in 2024, the Classic Baseball Era Committee voted for his induction.
Robert Clayton, the CEO and cofounder of the Sports Analytics Club Program, said the club’s portfolio of Allen was sent to the National Hall of Fame in April 2024, before his election last December.
While he can’t speak for the committee members, Clayton believes the portfolio could have contributed to Allen’s election, since it showed metrics comparable to other players who have been inducted.
» READ MORE: Dick Allen’s daughter was killed in 1991. His ‘biggest fan’ would have loved his Hall of Fame induction.
The group at Golda Meir, comprised mostly of high school seniors, originally worked on a performance portfolio for Rickie Weeks Jr.’s case to be elected into the College Baseball Hall of Fame. The second baseman played for the Milwaukee Brewers organization from 2003 to 2014 and was a two-time batting champion at Southern University.
Weeks was inducted in 2022, while they were working on the project, so the club decided to shift to another baseball player. They came across Allen, the former Phillie.
SACP works with its club chapters, which includes 38 schools across the country, to find professional and college athletes who haven’t received the recognition they deserve. SACP’s mission is to help students develop the skills they need to succeed in data science and artificial intelligence careers, while providing them with the opportunity to make an impact through sports analytics projects.
“As the students and I were looking at Dick Allen’s data, we kind of realized, like, ‘Hey, this guy was really good,’” said David Benz, a math teacher at Golda Meir and one of the club’s advisors. “We were trying to figure out why he didn’t get elected, and the students found a lot of the Civil Rights aspects of his story, and they gravitated a little bit more towards that.”
While the activity’s purpose was to learn data analytics, coding, and other technical skills, students found themselves interested in how to research more nuanced parts of Allen’s past. Benz and his coadvisor Lauren Jagemann, who teaches statistics, saw it as a positive secondary impact of the project.
“They had never really worked on such a real world applicable and data driven research project,” Jagemann said. “There’s more to statistics than just the numbers. And one thing that this group of students really got into was the story behind the data. There’s the numbers, but also the context, of the time that he was in the league, and what was happening socially. And they have a more well rounded view of what data science is now.”
Students worked on Allen’s performance portfolio for months. They crammed in club meetings on lunch breaks and stayed after school. They learned to code and how to quickly digest data, while researching about Allen’s life on and off the field.
They also made graphs comparing his statistics to other hall-of-famers, to prove that he was good enough analytically. Initially, their presentation showed statistics of an anonymous player, but they received feedback that it was “too gimmicky,” said graduate Chaim Robinson, who worked on the portfolio in 2023-24 and now attends the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“We just showed a lot of the stat metrics and compared this player to other Hall of Famers,” Robinson said. “We asked, ‘Does he, or does he not deserve to be inducted, because, based off of this blindly, he’s more than qualified.’ When we put a name to the face, though, and said this is Dick Allen, his reputation outside of baseball gets involved, and now you start seeing the reasons why he is not invited to the Hall of Fame.”
Working on the project was valuable, Robinson said, and he’s glad Allen is being recognized.
“It definitely had a positive impact on the students,” said Michelle Morris-Carter, the principal at Golda Meir. “They loved being challenged by the higher level mathematical applications that needed to be used. They loved the research part, they loved presenting their data to people.”
Many Philly fans will be celebrating Allen’s induction, and so will a club and its advisors in Milwaukee.
“It was affirming that what the students could do with data could matter,” Benz said. “And that as the leader of those students, we could get them to think about and talk about and work with data in a way that was meaningful in the real world and really shined light on Dick Allen and his baseball career.”