‘Phillies Extra’ Q&A with John Middleton: Growing up a Dick Allen fan

Moments after the election results were read on television, as the emotion poured out and the elation set in, someone handed a cell phone to Richard Allen Jr.

On the other end, John Middleton offered congratulations.

These days, Middleton is best known as the owner of the Phillies. But he was nine years old in 1964, when Dick Allen burst onto the scene with light-tower power that hadn’t been seen before from the home team at Connie Mack Stadium.

Allen was a sensation — and Middleton’s first baseball hero. So, when the news broke on that Sunday night in December that Allen had finally been elected to the Hall of Fame, four years after his death, Middleton wept.

» READ MORE: After 20 misses, late Phillies star Dick Allen is finally a Hall of Famer: ‘It should’ve happened so long ago’

“I was sitting with [my wife] Leigh after we got back from the Eagles game, and I started crying,” Middleton said that night. “I said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ I never thought it would happen because it should’ve happened so long ago.”

Middleton will join Allen’s family and friends Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. But first, he joined Phillies Extra, The Inquirer’s baseball show, to reflect on Allen’s life and career. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Watch the full interview below and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

A: He really was the first five-tool phenom that I saw with the Phillies, and they had some very good players: Johnny Callison, right fielder; Jim Bunning, Chris Short, pitchers. But Dick was just a sensational baseball player. … I was born in [1955], so I started really following the Phillies, watching them with my father in 1960, ‘61. At that age you kind of become more and more aware of players and the team … And they weren’t very good then. Actually, they were quite bad. So even though we had some good players, we didn’t have what I would call a core and a nucleus. And Dick being the fourth player there — and Tony Taylor was good, too — but those were the four key guys, and Dick was the best. So, he was a significant addition to that original grouping of three.

» READ MORE: Dick Allen was one of baseball’s most misunderstood players. But in his hometown of Wampum, Pa., everyone ‘knows the truth’

By 9, I was fully cognizant of the Phillies and their batting. I was reading the paper on a regular basis. I was looking at the box scores. I was comparing our players to the other team’s players. There used to be box scores in The Inquirer. They’d do the top 10 in batting average and home runs and RBIs for the two leagues. And I was always looking where our guys were on those lists.

So, when he stepped onto the stage there in late 1963 — I think he played 12 games or something like that in ‘63 — but in ‘64, when he was a rookie, he was just transcendent. I mean, he was a runaway choice for the Rookie of the Year. He placed highly in the MVP balloting, too. I mean, he was as real a deal as you could get in baseball back then.

A: I was not there the day he put one out over the Coke sign, which stood on top of the roof in left-center field [at Connie Mack Stadium]. But I was there when he put one over the roof, not the Coke sign, but the roof. And I was there when he put one out dead-center field, which was a long, long fly ball back there in Connie Mack Stadium. Bill Jenkinson, who’s a baseball historian, said in my brochure that I put together for Dick’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame, “The only person in the entire history of the game who may have had an edge on Dick Allen for pure power is Babe Ruth.” I mean, that’s how extraordinary he was. And we got to see that on a regular basis.

» READ MORE: Visiting Dick Allen in the hospital made a 9-year-old realize that his hero was also human

Now, unfortunately, back in the mid-’60s, they didn’t have television. They weren’t televising a lot of games, so you saw a little bit of it. You might see some highlight reels on news at night or something like that and see photographs in the paper. But they didn’t have ESPN, and they didn’t have the internet where you could go and Google ‘Dick Allen’s 10 best home runs’ or something like that. But if you went to the games enough, you saw one. And I’ll tell you what, he hit some out that were really loud and really long, too. So it was amazing to watch the guy.

Nobody got up from their seat when Dick Allen was at bat. … It’s kind of like with Ryan Howard when he was there. And more recently with Bryce [Harper] and [Kyle] Schwarber. I mean, when they’re at bat, you never know when they’re going to go off. When they go off, it’s amazing.

A: The early ‘60s was a very bad time in this country, racially. You know, the Great Society was being pushed by [President] Lyndon Johnson in about that time. The Civil Rights Movement was getting started. You had marches in Selma. You had National Guards forcing integration down in schools. And Philadelphia has been called ‘the northernmost southern city.’ And the race relations in Philadelphia in the early ‘60s were bad. There were some very bad riots in North Philadelphia in ‘63. And so, two things: One is Dick really wasn’t welcomed here the way a sports superstar should have been welcomed, because of his race. And not only that, they treated him terribly. I mean, just unconscionably badly. But everything he did and everything he said was kind of seen through that prism of racism. So, he was never getting the benefit of any doubt with a lot of people. And I hate to say it, but you’d see it in the reporters, too. I mean, it wasn’t just the fans in the stands. It was really endemic. And systemic.

» READ MORE: Maybe Dick Allen’s inclusion in the Hall will help heal Philadelphia’s deep racial wounds in baseball

The thing I remember in that regard is, usually my dad and I were sitting in the bleachers, but for some reason one game we were down in the second row, kind of just to the first base side of the dugout. And when Dick walked off the field between innings to come back to the dugout, somebody threw a Coke bottle that just missed my father and me and landed a few feet from Dick. And people wonder, 'Why is he wearing a batting helmet on the field?’ Well, that’s why. They weren’t throwing marshmallows at him or doughnuts. They were throwing Coke bottles and rolled up wads of nickels and quarters and things like that. It was just terrible.

And he never got away from it. It happened at the stadium, but then when he went home he had the same thing. Hate letters that were being delivered into his mailbox, death threats on the phone and letters, people dumping his garbage on his front yard. His daughter was nearly hit in the head by a rock that was thrown through the living room window. When people would talk to me about Dick being a difficult person while he was playing, I’d say, ‘My God, [if] that happened to me?’ I thought Dick was actually remarkably restrained given what he went through. Because I don’t think I could have been nearly as restrained as Dick if that had happened to me and to my family.

So, I don’t think there’s any question that he got a bad rap and an unfair rap that was largely driven by the times that he lived in. And also the location. I think that he could have been in other cities that would have been much easier for Dick than Philadelphia was in 1964. The thing I also would point out to people, there’s this character clause for the Hall of Fame and everybody would kind of use that to say, ‘Well, Dick really doesn’t deserve to be in there.’ But character in people has really shown over decades, it’s over their lifetime, and not in any small, finite number of years in a period of their life. And when Dick retired, he spent his time going around, visiting people around the country and apologizing to them for maybe things that he had done to them, asking forgiveness, telling them that he forgave them.

» READ MORE: ‘Phillies Extra’ Q&A: Billy Wagner on the Hall of Fame, regret from playing in Philly, and more

You have to remember in ‘65, in batting practice, [Phillies teammate] Frank Thomas took a baseball bat and destroyed his shoulder. How did he do that? I can’t imagine a teammate doing that to another teammate. … yet he forgave Frank and he went up to see him and they exchanged Christmas cards for decades afterward. To me, that’s his character. That’s the true character.

He taught me more about forgiveness and Christian love than pretty much any preacher I ever listened to on a Sunday and from the pulpit. He was amazing at what he did and he deserves credit, and so the point I kept making to people up in Cooperstown is, this is a guy whose character should be emulated. It should be honored and it should be used as an example for people for how you should be living your life. He was just a great guy. He was a wonderful human being, the man I knew.