Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame induction marks the end of Frog Carfagno’s work for his friend

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Mark “Frog” Carfagno stepped out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum early Saturday afternoon, into brilliant sunlight and a temperate summer day, and considered for a few seconds where he was and what he had done. He had never been to Cooperstown before, and now here he was, having just strolled through the museum, less than 24 hours before Dick Allen would be inducted into the Hall.

Frog wasn’t sure he’d make it. His anxiety disorder had become so severe as to be close to crippling, and he’d developed a bladder infection, and for weeks he figured there was no chance he’d make the four-plus-hour drive here. But his sisters Sharon and Angela wouldn’t let him stay home. They booked a hotel room in town in January, put him in the car Friday morning, and told him, We’re not going to listen to you complain that you couldn’t be there.

“I couldn’t miss it,” he said. “I just couldn’t miss it.”

This had been Frog’s mission, his obsession, for more than a decade. In 2014, he had begun campaigning, with a relentlessness only a stalker could appreciate, to get Allen in. It was the best way he knew, maybe the only way he knew, to repay the debt that he believed he owed to him.

» READ MORE: As Dick Allen finally gets into the Hall of Fame, Bill James has no apologies for his cruel criticism of him

So much of the public, so many Phillies fans in the 1960s, had seen Allen as sullen and selfish, as a malcontent who was a toxic presence in a clubhouse, who wasn’t worth the trouble he seemed happy to cause. Frog saw him through a different prism. When he was a kid growing up in Southwest Philadelphia, Frog saw Allen as a man alone, a great player mistreated by fans who should have appreciated his talents more than they did. When he was a groundskeeper for the Phillies in the mid-1970s, in his late teenage years, Frog saw Allen as a man damaged by racism, a man who had struggled to endure — a man who met Frog, heard that his father had died when Frog was young, and told him, If you need anything, I’m here.

Allen gave him money so he could go down the Shore with friends. Allen, when he became an instructor in the Phillies organization, shared a hotel room with him during spring training. Frog would be puzzled whenever it was time for them to eat; Allen sometimes would set a meatball sandwich atop the shade of a lit lamp. And Frog would listen as Allen told him that, in the minors in Little Rock, during segregation, he couldn’t eat in a restaurant with his teammates. So they’d bring food back to the hotel for him, and he had to learn how to keep it warm or reheat it, and he never broke the habit.

After Frog lost his job with the Phillies, Allen drove to his house, picked him up, and spent a couple of days with him, the two of them opening the back of Allen’s truck, playing oldies and singing doo-wop songs in a Cherry Hill parking lot until 4 in the morning. Hell, yes, Frog was going to be here this weekend. Hell, yes, his sisters were going to make sure of it.

“His love of Dick like a father,” Angela said, “forced him to do this campaign for him.”

It was more than a campaign, really. It was his life’s work. Allen refused to lobby on his own behalf, refused to help — he was too proud to beg to be let back into anyone’s good graces. “I feel for the family,” Frog said. “They wanted it more than he did. He said he didn’t care, but I think he would have liked to be in.”

Frog and Allen’s son, Richard, started a guest-speaking series in 2014, the two of them bouncing from school to school in the city talking to students about Allen, about what Philadelphia was like in the 1960s, about an athlete and a world with which they were not familiar and could hardly picture in their minds.

» READ MORE: Bill Kashatus landed the final interview with Dick Allen before he died. His childhood hero then asked for a favor.

Their first stop was Archbishop Ryan, and the next day, a Ryan administrator called Frog and told him about all the students who had traded Dick Allen stories that night with their parents and grandparents. There were two press conferences at City Hall, with Mayors Michael Nutter and Jim Kenney and Gov. Tom Wolf. There were the infinite emails and phone calls and letters to Hall of Famers, to writers and broadcasters and celebrities in the sport, to anyone who might lend support.

“Between a rock and a stream,” he said, “the stream always wins.”

A red Phillies cap covered his head. A line of baseball fans snaked for a full block from the museum’s entrance. He stood on Main Street here, a short and thin man who will soon turn 72 and who with time and stress had lost weight and hair. His sisters hope his health will improve in the months to come. They have been worried about him. The nausea of waiting for the vote to turn in Allen’s favor, the years of fearing that all his work would be for nothing, had exacerbated his anxiety, had made him sick.

Was this all too much? Too obsessive? Maybe a man has to be a little crazy to do what Mark Carfagno did for Dick Allen. And maybe, in that little bit of craziness, lie the loyalty and love that make friendship beautiful.

Now that his work was finished, what will he do now?

He smiled ever so slightly.

“The next guy,” he said, “is Gene Mauch.”

He was kidding. I think.