Phillies Great Dick Allen Gets Number Retired — Now Get Him His HOF Induction

Dick Allen is finally getting the tributes he deserves. The Phillies retired Allen’s No. 15 in a ceremony Thursday. He will also be honored by the Phils next season at Citizens Bank Park when fans will be in attendance and can properly salute his storied career.

Now is also the time for Allen to receive the ultimate honor — induction into the Hall of Fame.

Allen’s resume is pretty darn impressive — a Rookie of the Year Award (1964), an MVP (1972), a 7-time All-Star, 351 home runs and a .292 career average. But one statistic says how HOF-worthy this guy is. That stat is OPS, a quick-and-easy barometer of a player’s greatness.

Allen’s .912 OPS ranks 54th on the all-time list — one spot higher than the greatest Phillie ever, Mike Schmidt (.906). Allen’s OPS is better than that of legends — Ken Griffey Jr. (.907), Willie McCovey (.889) and Willie Stargell (.889). His OPS is almost one hundred points better than three more icons — Joe Morgan (.819), Johnny Bench (.818) and Derek Jeter (.817). And, don’t forget, a slew of players who rank higher than Allen in OPS have been linked to PED use.

Critics of Allen may say he didn’t reach the unofficial HOF benchmarks — a .300 average or 400 homers. Both those benchmarks have become archaic in the wake of deeper analytics. For instance, Allen’s career OPS+ is the second highest of any retired player not in the Hall of Fame (only topped by Mark McGwire).

Phillies manager Joe Girardi sifted through Allen’s numbers and declared exactly what Allen is. “He’s a Hall of Famer for me,” Girardi said , noting that Allen played during “a dead-ball era.” That dead-ball era is courtesy of stud pitchers like Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax and Juan Maricial. Pitching was so good that MLB lowered the mound after the 1968 season, which has been dubbed “The Year of the Pitcher” — a year that Allen smashed 33 HRs.

Schmidt, a Hall of Fame third baseman who helped lure Allen out of retirement to return to Philadelphia for a second stint with the team in 1975, gave a speech on Allen during Thursday’s ceremony, describing the racism Allen endured. “He played in front of home fans that were products of that racist era (with) racist teammates and different rules for whites and Blacks. Fans threw stuff at him and thus Dick wore a batting helmet throughout the whole game. They yelled degrading racial slurs. They dumped trash in his front yard at his home. In general, he was tormented and it came from all directions. And Dick rebelled.”

Allen, who played nine seasons with the Phillies during a 15-year career, became known as “angry Black man” and even punched a white teammate who was needling him. Schmidt knows who Allen really was: “Dick was a sensitive Black man who refused to be treated as a second-class citizen.” Schmidt called Allen “an amazing mentor” who was wrongly labeled a “bad teammate” and “troublemaker.”

Schmidt said the negative labels have kept Allen out of the Hall of Fame, adding: “Imagine what Dick could’ve accomplished as a player in another era, on another team, left alone to hone his skills, to be confident, to come to the ballpark every day and just play baseball.”

Allen wasn’t elected into the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America and he fell one vote short in Golden Era Committee voting in 2014. The Golden Days Committee and the Early Days Committee will not vote this year because of COVID-19 and instead will meet during the winter of 2021.

So Allen will have to wait more than a year for the ultimate honor — an honor he rightfully he deserves.

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