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

On Sept. 9, 2014, three months before the members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Golden Era Committee would vote to determine whether any of the 10 candidates on their ballot were worthy of induction, the writer and statistician Bill James wrote an email inspired, at least partially, by a vague threat.

Dick Allen was one of those candidates. The vote marked perhaps his best chance, to that point, to get into the Hall. His friend Mark “Frog” Carfagno, a longtime Phillies groundskeeper, had so devoted himself to lobbying for Allen’s induction that the campaign had morphed into a quasi-obsession.

Carfagno was frustrated, disappointed, and angry that so many influential people within the sport either believed Allen wasn’t worthy of induction or didn’t care enough to take up the cause. But he reserved his harshest vitriol for one person in particular.

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“Bill James — I’d like to punch him in the face,” Carfagno said then. “That’s how it all started, I think.”

What started was a standoff that symbolized the broader and often bitter debate — now more than three decades old — over whether Allen deserved the honor that he will receive Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., when he will, finally and posthumously, enter the Hall of Fame. What started was a cold war that revealed as much about the man who received the threat as it did the man who levied it.

On one side were the Allen crusaders, the fans, media members, and baseball historians who argued that his performance on the field, especially considering the racist abuse he suffered throughout his decade in the Phillies organization, justified his induction. On the other side were those who insisted not only that Allen’s career statistics were short of Cooperstown’s standards, but that he was so corrosive within a clubhouse and so defiant of management that his teams actually were worse for his presence.

No one made the anti-Allen case more strongly than James — the father of sabermetrics, a bestselling author, an iconoclastic thinker, and an acerbic writer. In his 1994 book, The Politics of Glory: How Baseball’s Hall of Fame Really Works, he included a chapter called “ROUND-UP,” in which he appraised the Hall of Fame credentials of 41 players and managers. James started with Allen, spent 3½ pages of a 30-page chapter on him — more time and space than on any other candidate — and was withering in his criticism of him.

“He did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball,” James wrote. “And if that’s a Hall of Famer, I’m a lug nut.”

To Carfagno and his fellow pro-Allen partisans, James represented every thought leader in the sport who was ignorant when it came to Allen, who swallowed the conventional myths about their hero, who didn’t know or understand the quality of the player and the true heart of the person. Back in September 2014, when he was asked via email if he had any response to Carfagno’s comments, James made it clear that he hadn’t softened his stance on Allen much, if at all.

“I don’t think that anything I wrote about Dick Allen … was either untrue or unfair or inaccurate,” he wrote. “But I was young then, and I’m old now, and a lot of things look different when you’re old than they do when you’re young. The issue isn’t whether these things were true — I think they were true and are true — but whether it might have been better to let it pass without comment.

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“But I didn’t, so if some ignorant dips— wants to punch me in the face about something I wrote [20] years ago, that’s life in the big city. As long as he doesn’t actually DO it, I probably won’t call the police.”

Carfagno’s commendable loyalty to his friend notwithstanding, his verbal attack on James was excessive and unnecessary, especially given an obvious reality: There’s no way to know what effect James’ stance on Allen had on voters within the Baseball Writers Association of America or on members of the various Hall voting committees over the years.

Allen’s share of BBWAA votes actually peaked at 18.9% in 1996, two years after The Politics of Glory was published. (A candidate needs to receive 75% of the possible BBWAA votes to earn induction.) Writers were more inclined at the time to consider the totality of a player’s career than any particularly brilliant period within his career. And while Allen’s .292 batting average, 351 home runs, and 1,119 RBIs — the traditional stats by which a hitter’s value was measured — were excellent, they weren’t so outstanding that he would have been a shoo-in even if he hadn’t been such a lightning rod.

It’s probably enough to say that James’ negative appraisal didn’t help Allen’s chances — that if James had written forcefully in favor of Allen’s candidacy, the Veterans or Golden Era Committee might have voted Allen in sooner.

By 2014, though, the criteria and measurements that baseball analysts and fans relied on to evaluate the quality of a player had changed, and James had done as much as anyone to bring about that change. The alphabet soup of stats — WAR, OPS, OPS+ — that showed that Allen, from 1964 through 1974, was as good or better than several Hall of Famers from the same era can be traced directly to James’ revolutionary work. Allen, for instance, led the American League in WAR during his 1972 MVP season with the Chicago White Sox (8.6), led his league in OPS four times, and led it in OPS+ three times.

Still, James maintained that no amount of quantifiable offensive production could make up for Allen’s disruptiveness — that Allen was a block of stone tied to his teammates’ feet, dragging them down. “He was a manipulator of extraordinary skill,” James wrote in The Politics of Glory. “He could, and can, charm a rabbit out of his whiskers.” But it becomes apparent, when reading his skewering of Allen 31 years later, that James was stacking the deck, sometimes in the nastiest, most cynical of ways.

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He held it against Allen that in 1965 he “got into a fight with a teammate early in the season, forcing a trade,” a cheap and convenient framing of what actually happened: Frank Thomas used racially charged language to needle Allen, then hit him in the shoulder with a bat. The Phillies waived Thomas but told Allen they would fine him if he revealed how the fight had started. It’s also telling that, in evaluating whether Reggie Jackson belonged in the Hall, James neglected to mention that Jackson, while with the Yankees in 1977, quite literally tried to beat up manager Billy Martin during a game.

Citing one writer who suggested that Allen was misunderstood, that his brand of “rugged individualism” should have been admired more than it was, James wrote, “Rugged individualism? How about alcoholism, irresponsibility, and vindictiveness? How about paranoia and pettiness?” Never mind that Allen’s family members and friends acknowledge that he drank but deny that he was an alcoholic. James’ implication that alcoholism is a voluntary character flaw — that Allen chose to be irresponsible, chose to be vindictive, and similarly chose to be an addict — is graceless to the point of cruelty.

He wrote with the detachment of someone who had never met Allen, never spoken to Allen or those who knew him well, never asked Allen, What was it like to play in Philadelphia in the 1960s? He was glib and biting because he could be, as if he knew that he likely never would be in the same room with Allen, never have to look him in the eye, never be put in the position to say to his face what he had written about him from a safe distance.

James is 75, and come Sunday, he begins life as a lug nut. When asked in a July 14 email if he wanted to amend his commentary about Allen in light of Allen’s selection to the Hall, he replied: “I’ll pass. I wouldn’t have voted for Allen, but then, I wouldn’t have voted for 50 other people who have been elected, either. Allen’s failings have been forgotten over the years, and probably it is for the best that they should be forgotten.” It certainly would be best for Bill James and his reputation if they were.

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