The summer in Little Rock of Dick Allen
Noting Richie Allen’s passing this week, someone asked why he isn’t in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
For the same reason, it was said, that Albert Belle isn’t.
Belle, preferring not to be called Joey, was passed over for the 1995 American League Most Valuable Player award despite better numbers in most major categories than winner Mo Vaughn of Boston. That year, Belle became the first major- league player to hit 50 home runs and 50 doubles in the same season. He was one of only six players in MLB history to have nine consecutive 100RBI seasons. But his off- field image suffered when he ranted against a group of reporters in Cleveland’s dugout, including NBC Sports personality Hannah Storm, during the 1995 World Series.
Allen, who later asked to be called Dick, was a Boy Scout by contrast, though he defined the term “surly slugger” in a 15-year MLB career. Though his best season came with the Chicago White Sox, Allen is remembered mostly for his work in Philadelphia. He was not the first professional athlete to be booed in the City of Brotherly Love — Carson Wentz, a present- day Eagles quarterback, can tell you that hasn’t changed — but Julius Erving he wasn’t.
Teams that traded for Allen knowingly took on baggage. Baseball was something he played when not at the racetrack. He famously said of artificial turf that he objected to playing on something that horses wouldn’t eat.
On the whole, as W.C. Fields might say of the comedian’s native Philadelphia, the man from Wampum, Pa., compiled numbers worthy of Cooperstown induction. A seven-time All-Star, he hit 351 home runs and was named the 1964 National League Rookie of the Year and the 1972 American League Most Valuable Player. A veterans’ committee almost waved him through the doors of baseball’s shrine a few years back.
Starting in present day with Peter Edward Rose and dating back to Shoeless Joe Jackson, baseball is vague about who does or doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame. Not every selection is as obvious as Mariano Rivera and Cal Ripken. Two of the original inductees, Tyrus Raymond Cobb and George Herman Ruth, were no choirboys. If projecting a wholesome image off field be the deciding characteristic for admission, voters looked the other way with Mickey Charles Mantle.
Allen, to our knowledge, did not participate in baseball treason, of which Rose and Jackson came under suspicion. Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy said he put aside his personal feelings about Red Sox slugger Jim Rice when tabbing Rice for the Hall of Fame. The press is so out of favor these days that the coolness of Eddie Murray and Steve Carlton toward the media is not necessarily considered dishonorable.
Hall of Fame voters are “caught between the moon and New York City,” as singer Christopher Cross might say, when queried about baseball’s steroid era. Can Cooperstown still be taken seriously without Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez? Should Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, whose 1998 home-run derby brought people back to MLB ballparks in the wake of a damaging strike, be ostracized for the use of performance-enhancing drugs when it all went on for so long underneath baseball’s winking eye?
Against that backdrop, Richie Allen projects an almost pristine image like that of a baseball put into play by the home-plate umpire. But while playing, he came across as a big Black man with an attitude in a city that eats its young athletically speaking.
That said, no prospective Marine Corps member at Parris Island went through the initiation that Allen received in 1963 as the first Black member of the Arkansas Travelers baseball team.
Way before Little Rock prided himself as the first capital city future president Bill Clinton called home, the image remained of federal troops ensuring a safe integration of Central High School in 1957. Fittingly or not, then-Gov. Orval Faubus, no friend of the civil-rights movement, threw out the first pitch opening night in Little Rock before a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 7,000, including 200 black fans. The atmosphere was racially charged with picketers outside the ballpark carrying signs that read “Don’t Negro-ize baseball” or worse.
In those days, a Black man who didn’t “know his place” risked his life. Headline writers could get by with “Negro killed in car wreck.” An Allen could be referred to as a “dusky outfielder” or one could read that he played with “the natural exuberance of his race.” As columnist George Will said in Ken Burns’ 1994 documentary on baseball, we have developed more sensitive ears and can detect racism in all forms.
Little Rock newspapers were on shaky ground in dealing with the Travelers’ first black player. The Arkansas Gazette, which won two Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the Central High crisis, and the Arkansas Democrat, both covering the team, couldn’t let the story go unreported. But something of a hands- off approach was taken with Allen. The late Jim Bailey, Gazette baseball writer, said “The editors decided we’d be better off not getting things all stirred up again.”
Off the field, Allen could not exactly adopt Little Rock as a home away from home. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas online series, “He lived with a Black family in a Black section of town (Little Rock’s neighborhoods were segregated). He ate in restaurants only when accompanied by white teammates. He received threatening notes and letters throughout the season … Even during the games, Allen heard racial slurs from the grandstand as he returned to the dugout between innings.”
But like Jackie Robinson, NL Rookie of the Year in 1947 and NL Most Valuable Player two years later, for the Dodgers as a similar baseball pioneer, Allen distinguished himself with the Travelers. He led the team in hitting at .290 and the Pacific Coast League in home runs (33), runs batted in (97) and triples (12). His 33 homers by a right-handed hitter remained a Traveler record for nearly 40 years. Fans voted Allen the team’s most valuable player at season’s end.
Who knows, it might have gone differently for Allen had not the Phillies, six games in front with 10 to play, not given away the 1964 National League pennant. In a dramatic seven- game World Series between the Cardinals and Yankees, America was introduced to Bob Gibson and Lou Brock and got one last glimpse of Mickey Mantle.
How tranquil it all seemed then. Lyndon B. Johnson, swamping Barry Goldwater in the presidential election that fall, dreamed of a “great society.” For most Americans, Vietnam and Cambodia were distant spots on a map. Long hair and all, the Beatles spoke for many with their sixth No. 1 single of 1964, “I Feel Fine.”
Yet how far have we actually come? Little Rock has a Black mayor and recently considered a Black woman for the U.S. House of Representatives but still has racial rumblings. I remember the first minority football players at War Memorial Stadium being looked at as a sideshow. High expectations were placed upon the first Razorbacks of color, Almer Lee in basketball and Jon Richardson in football, long before anyone heard of Nolan Richardson.
One is left to wonder how Richie Allen bore up in 1963 in Little Rock. In the last summer of John F. Kennedy’s life, it could not have been Camelot for the first Black member of the Arkansas Travelers.