[wolf441]

Originally Posted by Tabe

That's false. Allen's teammates - Goose Gossage and Mike Schmidt, to name two - and managers (Gene Mauch) all praised Allen as a teammate and competitor. The "cancer" thing comes from him taking the job of a white teammate early in his career and an ensuing fight that was not his fault.

I honestly never saw Allen play, but reading the below from Dave Fleming in 2008, he doesn't sound like an all out competitor.

Dick Allen, The Player



Looking only at his record, it is a little surprising that Dick Allen hasn’t been elected to the Hall of Fame. He won the 1964 Rookie of the Year and the 1972 AL MVP. He was a seven-time All-Star, a high .300 hitter with remarkable power. His career numbers suffer slightly because his prime years took place in an era of low offense, but by any reasonable measure Dick Allen was a great hitter.


Conservatively, Dick Allen was one of the top forty hitters of all-time. And that’s very conservative. He averaged 31.68 Win Shares per 162 games, which is higher than any first baseman except Lou Gehrig. Dick Allen won a few major awards and was the best offensive player in the game for ten years. His career line is a little low, but his peak is remarkable. His statistical record is the record of a Hall of Fame player.



Dick Allen, the Man



So we come to Dick Allen, the man. The debate about whether or not Dick Allen should be in the baseball Hall of Fame rests entirely on our interpretation of his personality, and how that personality influenced the teams he played on.



Bill James once wrote that Dick Allen “did more to keep his teams from winning than anyone else who ever played major league baseball.” In his Historical Abstract, Bill added that Dick Allen was the second most controversial player in baseball history, behind Rogers Hornsby.



Think about that for a moment: Dick Allen was the second most controversial player in history.



Here’s an exercise: write down a list of the most controversial players in baseball history. Ty Cobb would be on the list. Joe Jackson created a fair bit of controversy. Hal Chase: he was the Devil in a uniform. Babe Ruth generated a little bit of press, I suppose, and though it's forgotten now, Ted Williams was about as disliked as any player ever was. Joe Medwick almost caused a riot in the 1934 World Series and was nearly killed by a teammate. Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose had their moments. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are our current lightning rods.



I wasn’t around to follow Dick Allen’s career, but I have little reason to contradict Bill’s comments. And wherever Allen ranks among the most controversial players, there is no doubt that Dick Allen had a career filled with controversy. And you know what? A lot of that controversy is sort of ignored right now. It sure seems that accounts about Allen have undergone a kind of historical revision.



I’ll give you an example: the late Gene Mauch, Dick Allen’s former manager, was often asked about Allen. In those interviews Mauch made a concerted effort to describe Allen in a flattering light. He repeatedly called Allen the greatest player he ever managed, and when pressed to speak of Allen’s flaws, Mauch was quick to reject any suggestion that Allen wasn't a saint. If pressed hard, Mauch cites Allen’s chronic tardiness.


And you know what? Allen was chronically tardy. But saying so is a sort of half-truths: Allen was tardy because he was often stopping at bars before games to drink. And Mauch covered for Allen for years: time and time again Allen would miss games or get fined for causing trouble, and Mauch would explain everything away an innocuous excuse. Dick Allen has been fined for being late. Dick Allen isn’t playing because he has a sore body part. It wasn’t true. You get the sense, too, that Mauch wanted to be on the right side of history. He doesn’t want the teams he managed described as having any racial tensions. And to that end, he certainly wouldn’t want to voice any criticism of that team’s most visible black player.

Historical gerrymandering aside, I think Mauch’s motivations for making excuses for Dick Allen stemmed from the very best of human intentions: he wanted to protect Allen from fans who were exceedingly hard on Allen and a press that rode his ass from day one. It was an act of compassion for Mauch to say years later: “Dick Allen was always tardy,” when he really meant “Dick Allen had a serious drinking problem.” Compassion, sure, but it’s still a lie.



For those of us who didn’t follow Allen’s career, that sort of stuff is glossed over. How many of us know that Allen, eager to get out of Philly, started scratching notes in the on-deck circle. He wrote “Oct. 2” because it was the last day he’d have to wear the Philly uniform, and when the fans got on his case he wrote, “Boo.” It’s actually a little bit funny: he’d write stuff like “Mom” and “No,” and people in the stands would freak out. That’s hardly ever mentioned. He missed a doubleheader in 1969 because he was at the horse tracks, and then bitched and moaned when he was suspended. The suspension was lifted almost immediately, but Allen sat out 26 games, causing President Nixon to send Allen a message to start playing. When he came back, he insisted on his own private dressing room and made threats that ‘something would happen,’ if anyone complained. His manager quit in frustration when Allen refused to play an exhibition game against the Philly AA team.



All that crap is forgotten about. What is attended to, what is given weight in our considerations of Allen’s career, is the abuse he endured in 1963, as a member of the Phillies AAA team in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the similar abuse he endured from the Philadelphia fans and press. This stuff is brought up as a way to explain away Allen’s behavior, and to clarify the contexts of his times. The same holds true over Allen’s fight with teammate Frank Thomas: in the telling of the story, close attention is given to the racial overtones of the fight, to Thomas’s taunts about Cassius Clay and Malcolm X.



We strive, in this modern age, to understand contexts. We want to understand how Dick Allen became Dick Allen. It’s a reasonable aspiration, even a noble one. But it does Allen a disservice of sorts: by focusing on the circumstances that surrounded him, we deny the possibility that Allen had choices within those circumstances. He made the choice to be self-destructive. He made the choice to fight with Thomas, to chide Thomas and to rise to Thomas’s race-baiting. Allen had the talent to be an all-time great and he wasn’t. And as much as the world around him was set against him, he bears responsibilities for that failure.



I think Dick Allen is understood in two different ways, two conceptions that are separated by generational lines. Those of us who didn’t watch Allen, those of us who came along too late to see Allen and read the daily reports of his behavior, we grew up indoctrinated in the belief that context trumps character. That where we come from and what traumas we endure have a large role in shaping the kind of people we become. For this reason, we tend to think that Dick Allen’s failings are the failing of the larger society, while his successes are the triumphs of a courageous but flawed individual.



But those who did watch Allen, those who fought in a difficult war and endured the decade of social revolution that followed, they placed a greater burden on the actions of the individual. Life is hard, and the best we can do is use those hardships as motivations. Henry Aaron did that. Jackie Robinson did, too. So did Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente and Larry Doby and Curt Flood and countless others. Dick Allen didn’t. Where the others strived for greatness, Dick Allen was content to sow discord and squander his ability. He should have been an all-time great, and he wasn’t. That was his choice.



I don’t know which interpretation is right, or if either one is completely fair. But the question about Dick Allen and the Hall of Fame is a hard question to answer, because it extends beyond simply statistical analysis. It encroached on the terrain of how we imagine we should live our own lives, and by what measure we judge the lives of others.