Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame induction allows the Phillies, and Philly, to turn the page on the past

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Alongside the stage here at the Clark Sports Center, a giant video board began to show a highlight montage to preface Dick Allen’s formal induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. A chyron promised that the attendees would hear Mike Schmidt on Dick Allen, but the first voice on the video wasn’t Schmidt’s. It was the deep and unmistakable bass of John Facenda, reading from a script that was at least 61 years old, referring to Allen as an “awesome talent with boundless potential.”

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It was a familiar voice providing a once-familiar description of Allen — a description fitting for the significance of Sunday’s afternoon ceremony. Allen had been that awesome talent, that young and spectacular player for the Phillies, in 1964, when he hit .318 with 29 home runs and led the National League in runs and triples and total bases and was named the league’s rookie of the year. That was the year before everything else that defined Allen’s career — and too often defined it unfairly — and Sunday’s induction was the moment that could wash away all that controversy, all the hard feelings and bad memories that lingered for Allen, for the Phillies and their fans, for anyone who insisted that Dick Allen didn’t deserve his place in Cooperstown.

At a dinner at a nearby hotel Saturday night, Schmidt and Phillies managing partner John Middleton delivered speeches that got to the heart of why this weekend, why Allen’s induction, mattered so much to the Phillies, to the franchise’s past and present, and future. Schmidt mentioned the labels affixed to Allen — bad teammate, bad guy, a selfish malcontent — that prevented the Hall’s voters from recognizing him years earlier. Middleton spoke of Allen as an imperfect man who understood he needed to make amends for his mistakes, sharing a remarkable and revealing anecdote: After he retired from baseball, Allen traveled the country “talking to people,” Middleton said, “asking for forgiveness for what he did and offering them forgiveness” in return.

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“If you think about the fact that those labels kept Dick out of the Hall of Fame,” Middleton said, “it stands to reason that when this year’s committee voted him in, what they did was they looked at those labels very differently. … They did not deny what Dick did during his playing days, but they acknowledged what he did in his post-playing days, his retirement — to make atonement, to be redeemed. Ultimately, by voting Dick in, they have vindicated Dick.”

That vindication started with the true start of Allen’s career with the Phillies: that 1964 season, with all its fun and thrills through its first 150 games, all of its misery through its final 12 and the National League pennant that the team let slip away. “I cried myself to sleep for two weeks in September of 1964,” filmmaker Mike Tollin, a Havertown native, said during the dinner, and he was just one of thousands of Phillies and Philadelphia sports fans who were scarred and embittered by that collapse. The people who lived through the summer of ‘64 passed that bitterness down to their children and grandchildren, to kids who grew up believing that the Phillies and every other team in town were cursed to failure.

This was a multigenerational phenomenon. This was a cloud that darkened the view of and in Philadelphia for so long that at times the city could be a miserable place to follow sports, to cover sports, to talk about sports with any hope, with any optimism, with any recognition of or appreciation for the greatness of the great athletes who played here.

Allen embodied the cost of that collective civic resentment. He was the best player on that ‘64 team, which made him the ultimate victim of guilt by association. Everyone remembers or has read about the 10-game losing streak that dropped the Phillies out of first place in the National League, that cost them the pennant and their first World Series berth in 14 years. The Year of the Blue Snow. Chico Ruiz. The myth of Gene Mauch’s burning out his two best starters, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, down the stretch.

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What goes unmentioned is that Allen, over those 10 straight losses, batted .415 with 17 hits and a 1.076 on-base-plus-slugging percentage. He was the last person who should have been blamed for that club crumbling as it did, yet he could never fully cleanse the stain of that season. There’s no doubt that Allen did himself no favors with much of his behavior, that he made more than his share of bad decisions. But there’s also no doubt that he had the bad luck to be born before most fans and media members were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a player who came into conflict with an owner or a coach or a manager — especially a Black player.

“He was obsessed with understanding the why,” his widow, Willa, said during her speech Sunday, and in those days, that kind of impertinence in an athlete wasn’t valued or desired by the people who paid to see him play. Allen would have had to hit 70 home runs, drive in 185, and bat .400 in a single season for people to consider the possibility that he might have a point about the Phillies and Philadelphia of the 1960s. About an organization that was too late to sign its first Black player and that rarely stood up publicly for its star, even when a teammate smacked him with a bat. About a city where Allen had to duck Coke bottles chucked at him from the bleachers and rocks that shattered the windows of his home.

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“Dick has amazing statistics,” Middleton said. “But Dick’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame over the last 40 years hasn’t foundered on the question of whether his performance on the field was good enough to warrant his admission. It foundered on the question of his character.”

That question isn’t a question anymore. A page was turned Sunday. A difficult era, one that was full of discontent, should be left in the past. Powerful and imperfect, flawed and fantastic, a man in full, Dick Allen is a Hall of Famer. It is all he ever has to be, now and forevermore.