Maybe Dick Allen’s inclusion in the Hall will help heal Philadelphia’s deep racial wounds in baseball

“… if only Dick Allen were alive to see his long overdue selection as a Hall of Famer.”

How often do you think that sentiment has been uttered in the last few days?

The Classic Era Committee announced Sunday that its selections for enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2025 are Dick Allen and Dave Parker — arguably among the most feared hitters in Phillies and Pirates history, respectively.

Undoubtedly, Pirates fans are lamenting the languorous amount of time that passed before the Hall acknowledged Parker’s bona fides as one of the game’s great sluggers. The hope is that Parker, a giant still in our collective memories, will get to witness his enshrinement in July despite his battle against debilitating Parkinson’s disease.

» READ MORE: Dick Allen, the Phillies’ first Black star, didn’t let the boos and racism stop him from becoming an icon

Allen, who died in 2020 at age 78, will be honored posthumously, a bittersweet cleansing and final chapter in the story of him and his oft-time antagonistic relationship with baseball and the Hall of Fame voters within the media of his era.

When his enshrinement is complete and he joins other Phillies such as Mike Schmidt and Richie Ashburn in Cooperstown, much will be made of a franchise finally seeing its first African American player elevated to the game’s highest peak. With that, my question is, will the ceremony not only bring closure, but provide a salve, not only for Allen and his family, but even more so for this city, the Phillies organization, and its fan base?

The Phillies, and race, have always been a third rail in the history of this city’s sports. The No. 1 reason was the ungodly rancid and racist treatment of Jackie Robinson when the Brooklyn Dodgers rookie became the first African American major leaguer in modern baseball history in 1947.

Reason 1-A? The team’s slow walk to integrating its own roster, then its overt love-hate relationship with Allen, the Phillies’ first All-Star caliber African American player. While other teams courted Black players, thus converting Dodgers/Robinson fans to ones of their own, the past Phillies administrations of the 1950s and ‘60s looked the other way, not adding an African American until John Kennedy joined the team briefly in 1957, becoming the third-to-the-last team to “integrate.”

As for the fan base, little outcry was paid to the obvious differences being made to the quality of play and teams’ fates by the likes of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Larry Doby, Ernie Banks, and Billy Williams, and, of course, Jackie Robinson.

The Phillies finally got their Robinson when Allen rose through the ranks of the minor leagues and immediately blew away the competition in his award-winning rookie campaign, with 29 homers and 91 RBIs in 1964. With the skills held by few major leaguers before him, he became a legendary line-drive menace, not a given in a decade dominated by future Hall of Fame pitchers like Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Ferguson Jenkins, Jim Bunning, and Juan Marichal.

» READ MORE: The legend of Dick Allen's 42-ounce bat

Countless will unapologetically claim to have been in Connie Mack Stadium when, according to urban legend, Allen hit pitches on a line so scorching on their rocket-like trajectory that infielders leaped for balls destined for the outfield seats.

According to ESPN.com, during his peak years from 1964 to ’74, Allen ranked fifth in home runs, seventh in RBIs and runs scored, and second in slugging percentage. ESPN also mixed in some newfangled figures, ranking him first in OPS+ and sixth in WAR among position players. Perhaps one day, over coffee, or something stronger, a stats person will explain the importance of such figures to me, but I will accept as fact this from ESPN.com: Allen’s adjusted OPS+ of 156 is tied for 16th among players since 1900 with at least 5,000 plate appearances. The same as Frank Thomas and higher than Mays (155) and Aaron (155).

Whatever the measurement, what remains clear is that stupefyingly, Allen had to wait 41 years to be declared a Hall of Famer.

The media played a role in that long march. Whether influenced by Allen’s controversies, real and imagined; or consciously or subconsciously aligned against him due to his race, the Baseball Writers Association of America, voters for Hall of Fame elections, rejected his candidacy for 14 years, never giving him more than 18.9% of their votes in any year when 75% was, and is, needed for enshrinement. During his time on the BBWAA balloting, there was little outcry about the reasons why, though it was widely known within the game and media ranks that Allen and the media had a truculent and at times hostile relationship.

This vote, by the Classic Era Committee, represents the finale of the Allen/Philadelphia saga for the Hall. Hopefully it will also enable the many to analyze and craft their own conclusions about the man and the game’s time period that in this one compelling case transcended baseball and peeled back the layers of unrest in an era.

It was the ’60s, and as some would say, “You had to be there, man.”

The machinations that saw so many fissures in society, especially between Black and white America, never allowed as fine a player as Allen to find peace and prosperity in an astute baseball town, because that town fit uncomfortably into the discomfiting bigger pictures of the time.

Allen came of age in the raucous, rebellious dying days of Jim Crow, when the battles for Civil Rights vied for headlines with burning cities. Concurrently, political assassinations, dead antiwar protesters strewed on the campus of Kent State, marches for the Equal Rights Amendment and against poverty, youth of the Woodstock generation rebelling against the Greatest Generation, all carved large portions of the fractious history of an era.

» READ MORE: Hayes: You can’t argue that Dick Allen doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame

Allen? The perennial All-Star mostly labeled as the Phillies’ bad boy was carving his name firmly into the list of noncompliant athletes and the like who chose not to stay safely straddled on the line on noninvolvement that predated the belief that athletes, especially African Americans, had an obligation to just “shut up and dribble.” Pretend, or accept the status quo? That was not Dick Allen, who chose more controversial paths, whether defying curfew, flat-out disappearing on game days, or ominously (to some) drawing messages like “Mom” in the dirt around first base. His line drives were epic, but so too was his ability to alienate the traditionalists, anger the game’s establishment, and perplex the team(s) that paid his salary.

If the establishment was angry, so, too, was Allen.

“It was tough back then, particularly for a Black man in the ’60s,” Allen told me in a 2006 interview. The man who was NL Rookie of the Year in 1964 but became a bigger star in Chicago, where he was the American League MVP in 1972 with the White Sox, added: “Things were crazy, going from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali — like they say, the times were changing. Hippies, street gangs, the mob. But I looked at it like Joe Frazier — toughness was in the heart, that’s how you dealt with segregation and people coming at you, wanting to hurt you.”

Allen lived long enough to reconcile with the Phillies, honored with membership in the team’s version of the Hall of Fame. He also lived to appreciate that times have changed, at least in temperament. The Phillies’ roster has never looked like the Pirates’ “Fam-i-lee,” in which Parker and Willie Stargell, Roberto Clemente and Al Oliver — players who were proud men of color — were major factors in number and performance on winning Pittsburgh teams. But he enjoyed seeing the city embrace Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins in ways he never experienced.

In 2006, a year after Howard’s rookie of the year campaign, Allen said of the citywide embrace of the first baseman: “I think the city’s ready, don’t you? We’ve never really had a billboard, marketable kid like this.”

If only that were not true.

Claire Smith is on the faculty at Temple and is the co-director of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media. She is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and a former Inquirer sports columnist.