For what he endured and how he triumphed, Dick Allen deserves the loudest Hall of Fame cheers

This weekend, an opportunity to start on a road well-traveled once more carries me back to Cooperstown, N.Y., to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

With the passing of each mile marker, ghostly centurions and greats stand by, watching over all who’ve spent lifetimes transcribing on their internal calendars all dates that make the national pastime integral to lives, loves, history, and culture.

The occasion of the journey is particularly poignant. Not only is it the annual celebration of the game’s latest class of Hall of Fame inductees and print and broadcast honorees. It will give the game one last opportunity to thank one particular inductee — Dick Allen — for having weathered more than should have been asked of him.

Sadly, his induction will proceed without him, Allen died Dec. 7, 2020, four years before he was posthumously elected to the Hall by the Classic Baseball Era Committee. I hope this gathering of his fellow Hall of Famers, fellow players, his teams, and his fans makes the most of an opportunity to say thank you to him.

The belated gratitude owed to Allen is for his manning all the fronts that stood as lines of demarcation in a changing America that was as complex as it was, too often, unforgiving.

Dick Allen, Phillies great, one of the organization’s most talented cudgels on the field, also was one of its biggest targets off, as victim and poster child of the many cultural changes of the mid-20th century, that messy and monumental era in which the Greatest Generation handed off many unresolved issues to its rebellious offspring.

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The Greatest Generation rid the world of fascism but could not so easily rid itself of Jim Crow, nor the second-class glass houses that confined women, nor the military drafts that feasted on the poor and more.

Sooner or later, the break had to come, and it did, when our elders’ children and grandchildren said, “No more.”

Youngsters stubbornly sat in the front of buses and demanded service at lunch counters to prove they belonged. They burned bras to protest the binds that bit and belittled. They put flowers in their hair and in National Guard rifle barrels in an effort to stop wars.

Allen, like so many young Black Americans, checked more than one box. His parents’ and grandparents’ generations, like mine, belonged to many Blacks who were all in for the party of Lincoln, certainly marching in spirit with King but still voting for Nixon, as did my grandfather.

Those who believed in peaceful protest shrank from the anger and restlessness that drove their children to the streets in search of new, outspoken voices. Youngsters who declined to conform to the old ways, becoming more and more outspoken as they came of age, certain of the righteousness of their causes and heroes, like Dick Allen.

Every time I write about Allen, I hear from those people who, as children, championed the players on and off the fields whom their parents simply couldn’t or wouldn’t tolerate. If tweens and teens could find ways to rebel, this was one of them. The Allen fans of yore speak of finding power in his power and, in many ways, their voice within him.

Al Downing, the former major league pitcher, witnessed it all. The left-hander most noted for giving up Hank Aaron’s 715th home run came out of high school into the predraft era of baseball in the late 1950s, one year after Allen came out of school in Wampum, Pa.

Downing, like Allen, was one of a handful of Black American players considered by the Phillies. But Downing, unlike Allen, was not signed.

“I heard that they thought I was too short to pitch in the majors, but I found out later it was likely something else,” Downing said, laughing, during a telephone interview from his home in Southern California. Downing, it turned out, was signed by one of the Phillies’ scouts after the birddog joined the Yankees.

Downing became intimately familiar with Allen’s story when he later played in Milwaukee for the Brewers with Hank Allen, Dick’s older brother.

“We talked all the time about those days,” Downing said of himself and Hank Allen. “The Phillies scouted all around Wampum and the towns in western Pennsylvania that had five or 10 Black families. But the Phillies’ whole attitude was kind of reminiscent of those times.”

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In short, the Phillies didn’t develop many Black players into superstars because they signed so few of the Black candidates they scouted. Remember, the Phillies were one of the last teams in the game to promote an African American to the majors; John Kennedy joined the team for a cup of coffee in 1957, 10 years after Jackie Robinson integrated modern baseball by signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Downing said he believed the theory that he was thought too short, until those telling conversations with Hank Allen and another pitcher sent on his way by the old regime in Philly.

“I realized what the real reason probably was when Fergie Jenkins told me the Phillies also said he would never be a major league pitcher, and that’s why they traded him to the Cubs,” Downing said.

Ah, well … That was the history of the old Phillies regimes of the 1950s, an era into which Allen landed when signed in 1960, making history by securing the team’s largest signing bonus ($70,000) ever given to a player of color.

That team history also reflected Philadelphia’s checkered and often violent history when it came to race by the time Allen made his big league debut in 1963.

“When it came to Philadelphia, Hank would say that, you know, they didn’t like the fact that [Allen] was outspoken about things,” Downing said.

Well, the times helped inform the personality and more, starting with the toughest moments, such as when the Phillies decided to send Allen to Little Rock and triple A, which landed him smack in the middle of a cauldron of civil rights unrest because of the federally mandated integration of Little Rock’s all-white high school.

» READ MORE: Dick Allen’s daughter was murdered in 1991. His ‘biggest fan’ would have loved his Hall of Fame induction.

Here, you had a kid from Wampum, which had about five Black families. And it was in an area out in western Pennsylvania that had many small towns with just a handful of Black residents.

And the Phillies sent him to Little Rock.

“It was kind of like the Yankees sending me from Trenton to Richmond to play. … Little Rock. … Richmond … of all the places,” Downing said quietly.

By the time Allen was an established star in Philly, he’d found his voice and more.

“He’d have the best year,” referring to the likes of his first full season, with 29 home runs in 1964, then 40 home runs and 110 RBIs in 1966, “then he’d ask for a raise,” Hank told Downing. “Then he’d be told, ‘You’re not this guy, you’re not that guy,” and Dick would say, ‘Yeah, I had a better year than that guy!’”

What Downing, the former Yankees and Dodgers starter, remembers differentiating his journey through New York and Los Angeles from Dick Allen’s time in Philadelphia, was the involvement of the media in informing a city’s opinion of its newest, biggest star.

“The media of the day were quick to portray Dick as being uppity. And you know what that means,” Downing said. “The message was ‘You’ve got to stay in your place.’ It wasn’t Black families telling him that. It wasn’t even the Phillies, really. One of his best friends was Richie Ashburn. Another was Johnny Callison. But the media, constantly saying, ‘You think you’re hot stuff.’ So, Philadelphia, a tough sell to fans to begin with, started to react.”

In a city that wasn’t close to accepting integrated neighborhoods, where police and Black Americans had a continuous cold war, controlling the message was no small thing. However, that generational divide did have its moments.

“Dick would point out that some fans would tell him, ‘I’m just going to see you,’” Downing recalled Hank saying.

One such fan Dick Allen counted on was Ruly Carpenter, son of the then-team owner R.R.M. Carpenter Jr. Ruly joined his father’s front office in 1963, Dick Allen’s first in the majors.

“He and Dick were close,” Downing said of Ruly Carpenter, who ascended to team president at age 32. “The old man, he started coming around. Ruly was young and thought differently.”

Was Dick Allen perfect? Name a Hall of Famer who is. Then name one who had to build his career while steeling himself against a nation and a world too often at war with itself.

There was Jackie. There was Doby. And, alas, there was Philadelphia’s version with a happy ending.

The above are but some of the stories from those who knew Dick Allen, who cheered for Dick Allen, and who now chronicle a different narrative that the Wampum Hall of Famer would want the world to remember. Because these are the stories that molded the man, the major leaguer, the Hall of Famer.

These are the stories that did not, could not, break Dick Allen. For that, and more, are the cheers that will accompany him into the game’s most exclusive club.

A club that hopefully will be among the loudest on Induction Day 2025 in Cooperstown.