Dick Allen, Dave Parker Hall of Fame Legacies Finally Resolved

By CHARLIE VASCELLARO
COOPERSTOWN

If Dick Allen’s cleats could talk, what a tale they would tell. Perhaps they could explain why he chose to walk away from the Chicago White Sox in September of 1974, while leading the American League in home runs with nearly a quarter of the season left to play.

If the enigmatic and outspoken Allen were still alive, he might be able to add some insight as well, and perhaps answer some lingering questions about his often puzzling and controversial career.

Allen’s red and white striped Adidas cleats are on display in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s 2025 “New Inductees” exhibit on the hall’s second floor. Just like nearly every artifact in the hall’s collection, there is a back story to Allen’s cleats. Although they can’t tell us what happened on the day he decided to walk away, there is someone who can.

Bob Hemond, 61, is the son of former White Sox General Manager Roland Hemond. The elder was a seven-decades-long Major League Baseball executive and the first recipient of the Hall of Fame’s Buck O’Neil Award in 2011.

Bob was a 10-year-old kid nosing around where he wasn’t supposed to be in the home team’s clubhouse at Comiskey Park when he witnessed this turning point in Allen’s career.

One of five Hemond children, Bob was breaking one of his father’s three hard and fast rules: 1. Be off the field before the gates open; 2. Don’t ask players for autographs, and; 3. No going into the clubhouse during the game.

“One game day in late August, I ventured up to the clubhouse door,” Hemond said. “The security guard let me in because he had seen me many times before. It was completely empty until Dick Allen walked in, and the game was still going on. I think this is when he decided he was going to quit baseball. He was very quiet, smoking a cigarette and removing his cleats. He tossed his cleats into the clubhouse trash can and flicked his cigarette butt into the can on top of the cleats.”
Young Hemond walked over to Allen and asked if he could have his cleats.

“Sure, kid,” was Allen’s response.

It was a great time to be one of Roland Hemond’s kids.

“Before White Sox games, me, my brother, my sisters, and all the others players’ kids would have pick-up games on the Old Comiskey Park playing field. Many times, Dick Allen would leave the clubhouse early to throw batting practice to us,” said Hemond. “We would also shine shoes for the players in the clubhouse before Sox home games.”

“All of us kids loved Dick Allen, but for me he became my absolute favorite player, mostly because of his on-field playing skills for the White Sox,” said Hemond.

Allen led the league with 37 home runs, 113 RBI, 99 walks, a .420 on base percentage, a .603 slugging percentage and a 1.023 OPS (slugging plus on base percentage). He was named to his fifth All-Star team (first AL squad). Roland Hemond was named AL General Manager of the Year after being advised by his father-in-law, Phillies GM John Quinn, not to sign Allen.

“My father and grandfather were on a flight to Hawaii heading to the winter meetings when a reporter told my dad he was named the GM of the Year, said Hemond, “And dad yelled, ‘Thank you, Dick Allen,’ loud enough for my grandfather, who was seated nearby, to hear.”

A Long Time Coming

Poor Dick Allen and Dave Parker. Both waited a long time to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and neither will be here in Cooperstown to take part in the Induction Day ceremony.

After exhausting their opportunities to be elected on the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot, both Allen and Parker were elected by the Hall of Fame’s 2024 Classic Baseball Era Committee.

Forgive the editorializing, but it’s a shame that Dick Allen, who died of cancer in December 2020, did not live to see this honor. It stings with added poignancy that he fell just one vote short each of the previous two times his name appeared on an Era Committee ballot.

It’s also tragic for Parker, who died from complications associated with Parkinson’s disease on June 28 of this year, just a month before the scheduled Induction Day ceremony. At least he knew he was a Hall of Famer.

Dick “Don’t Call Me Richie” Allen burst on the big-league scene, winning the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award in 1964, knocking 29 home runs with 91 RBI while playing in all 162 games. He led the league with 13 triples, 125 runs scored and 352 total bases. He finished seventh in NL MVP voting.

Despite his objection, Allen was tagged with the moniker “Richie” upon his arrival in Philadelphia. According to biographer Mitchell Nathanson, (“God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen,” 2016), “Richie” was used to connect the team’s hot new prospect in lineage to its most recent former star, Richie Ashburn. Allen never warmed up to it.

“It makes me sound like I’m 10 years old,” Allen was quoted at the time. “Anybody that’s close to me and knows me well calls me Dick. I don’t know why as soon as I put on a uniform it’s Richie.”

Allen was voted to the first of three consecutive NL All-Star teams in 1965 and began establishing himself as one of the league’s top sluggers. He hit a career-high 40 home runs in 1966 and led the league with a .632 slugging percentage and 1.027 OPS, finishing fourth in MVP voting. In 1967, he led the league with a .404 on-base percentage and a .970 OPS.

Despite being one of the game’s rising stars, Allen’s time in Philadelphia might best be described as tumultuous. Right from the start, Allen got off on the wrong foot with members of the media, fans and a few teammates. He infamously brawled with 36-year-old veteran slugger and teammate Frank Thomas in July of 1965, resulting in Thomas’ dismissal.

Whether it was the Phillies organization and the writers referring to him as Richie, or fans and teammates using more offensive racial slurs, Allen responded, or didn’t respond, in his own way.

“No baseball season in my 15-year career had the highs and lows of ’64,” Allen said. “I was the National League Rookie of the Year, but I made over 40 errors at third base. The fans in Philadelphia booed me right from the start, and then at the end of the season they actually had a “Richie Allen Night” for me. The Temptations said it the best baby, I was a ball of confusion,” said Allen in his autobiography “Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen,” written with Tim Whitaker.

The Phillies were the last team in the National League to integrate, signing its first Black player, John Kennedy, in 1957. Allen was the team’s first Black star, earning a starting job in his rookie season. It wasn’t easy.

After six tumultuous seasons, during which he averaged 30 home runs, in October of 1969 Allen was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in a multi-player swap that would have sent center fielder Curt Flood to the Phillies.

While Allen was eager to get a new lease on life and continue his career elsewhere, Flood was famously furious with the trade, writing in his 1971 autobiography, “The Way It Is”:

“Philadelphia. The nation’s northernmost southern city. Scene of Richie Allen’s ordeals. Home of a ball club rivaled only by the Pirates as the least cheerful organization in the league,” said Flood.

“When the proud Cardinals were riding a chartered jet, the Phils were still lumbering through the air in propeller jobs, arriving on the Coast too late to get proper rest before submitting to murder by the Giants and Dodgers. I did not want to succeed Richie Allen in the affections of that organization, its press and its catcalling, missile-hurling audience,” said Flood, who never reported to Philadelphia. But that’s another story.

Allen enjoyed his time in St. Louis and playing for Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst. He had another typically “Allenesque” year in 1970, knocking 34 home runs with 101 RBI in an abbreviated campaign cut short by a torn hamstring in mid-August. Allen was blind-sided by a trade to Los Angeles at the end of the season.

“I was getting to like St. Louis, to feel comfortable,” he said. “Then a couple of weeks after the season, I got a call from Bing Devine, the Cardinals general manager. ‘Rich,’ he said, ‘we’re sending you to the Dodgers.’ That’s all he said. No explanation. No good luck. No thanks.”

Although he continued to put up decent numbers (23 HR, 90 RBI, and a.295 batting average), Allen struggled to fit in in Los Angeles.

“The Dodger organization also emphasizes contact with the fans. They put a lot of pressure on players to sign autographs and have their picture taken. They want you to visit with celebs in the clubhouse before games. Have a laugh with Don Rickles. Eat spaghetti with Sinatra. I kept telling these guys, uh-uh, no, baby, I’m here to play ball. That other stuff is jive,” said Allen.

Another pattern was developing. At season’s end, Allen was traded again, in the deal that sent him from the Dodgers to the White Sox. Four teams in four years.

Allen’s two-and-a-half seasons with the White Sox amounted to some of the most productive playing time of his career. After his MVP season in 1972, Allen signed a three-year $250,000.00 per-year contract, making him the highest paid player in baseball at the time.

The Prodigal Son

If Allen’s cleats could talk, they might fill us in on the details surrounding the circumstances that prompted him to leave the White Sox with another year remaining on his record-setting contract. Allen spelled it out in his 1989 memoir.

“…in ’74, the Sox went and got Ron Santo from the Cubs. Things got real screwed up both on the field and in the clubhouse after that…He thought he should be the team leader automatically…I had become the White Sox team leader, not by choice, believe me, it just came my way by playing hard, leading by example…The tension between Santo and me began to spread to the other guys in the clubhouse. We stopped being a team. I was still hitting the ball and hitting it good. But we weren’t winning—and we weren’t having fun. Then one day Chuck [Tanner] came up to me and told me the dissension was ruining the team. He said, ‘There’s only room for one guy to run this team—and that’s me.’ That’s when I knew things would never be the same. I decided it was time to go home.”

Although Allen had unofficially retired, he was still under contract with the White Sox in December, when he was traded to the Atlanta Braves for cash and a player to be named later. Allen did not report to Atlanta.

“I spent a year in Little Rock and I’m not going back [to the Deep South],” he said.

The deal was not completed until the Braves ironically sent Allen back to Philadelphia.

Earlier in the spring, while Allen was still in a state of temporary retirement, the Phillies sent a contingent consisting of players Mike Schmidt and Dave Cash, as well as former Phillies legendary center fielder and broadcaster Richie Ashburn, to his home and horse farm in Wampum, Pennsylvania. Ashburn wanted to assure Allen that things had changed in Philadelphia since he left. He was referring to racial attitudes.

“It was the last place he wanted to come back to, but they convinced him to come back,” said author Nathanson.

The Philadelphia that Allen returned to was different from the one he left.

“The world changed between 1969 and 1975. It’s hard to imagine how much America changed in those years. Attitudes changed, not 100 percent. Everything wasn’t perfect, but a lot had changed since a decade before. Look at the fashion look in 1964 and 1970,” said Nathanson.

“My first time up as the Phillies’ Prodigal Son, I got a standing ovation. I singled to left and got another standing ovation. Ashburn had been right: Things had changed,” said Allen.

In his return to Philadelphia, in 1975 and 1976, Allen’s presence was more important as a mentor and player/coach to the younger players than as a force in the lineup.

In limited action, Allen hit 12 home runs in 1975 and 15 in 1976. He spent his last uneventful season with the Oakland A’s in 1977.

Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, who spent all of his 18-year career in Philadelphia and was a teammate of Allen’s during 1975 and 1976, called Allen “an amazing mentor” and supported his Hall of Fame candidacy every time Allen’s name appeared on a ballot.

“Dick was a sensitive Black man who refused to be treated as a second-class citizen…labels have kept Dick Allen out of the Hall of Fame,” said Schmidt, when the Phillies retired Allen’s number 15 in September 2020.

Allen finished his 15-year career with 351 homers, 1,119 RBI, 1,848 hits, a .292 batting average and a .912 OPS.

In his first year of eligibility for election to the Hall of Fame in 1983, Allen failed to receive the requisite 5 percent to remain on the ballot, garnering just 3.7 percent of the votes and finishing behind 23 candidates.

After a one-year hiatus, Allen’s name magically reappeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 1985, after some lobbying by “St. Louis Post-Dispatch” writer Bob Broeg and the creation of another committee to investigate candidates that were deemed overlooked.

During his time on the BBWAA ballot, Allen hovered between 15-20 percent, but fared closer on successive Era Committee Ballots until finally being elected this year.

Allen was a controversial character that was never completely understood by his fans or detractors.

“Each side had their arguments, and they were both wrong,” said biographer Nathanson. “One side said he wanted special treatment, and one said he didn’t. He did want special treatment, but not the kind they thought he wanted. He got booed after a race riot that occurred in Philadelphia that happened while the team was out of town and that he never commented on. He was a cypher for how people felt about racial issues. He was an avatar for other people’s opinions. It makes me wonder; what are people talking about when they’re talking about Dick Allen, because they’re not talking about Dick Allen.”