In a move that many baseball observers thought was badly overdue, feared slugger Dick Allen, along with former Pirate great Dave Parker, were elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame last week. He narrowly missed in two previous tries, including one time by just one vote. Allen joins other Bowman Field alumni, Jim Bunning, Nolan Ryan, Bill Mazeroski, and Jim Rice, in the baseball shrine. He was elected to the Bowman Field HOF in 2010.
Allen played here with the Williamsport Grays in 1962 and was one of the Grays’ and the Eastern League’s most dominant players that year.
In 1962, Allen played in 132 games for the Grays and batted .329, just barely being beaten out for the league’s barring title by Jim Ray Hart. He hit 32 doubles, 10 triples, 20 homers, and 109 RBIs, attained a slugging percentage of .548, and an OPS of .957. He was named to the Eastern League All-Star Team that year.
Allen was one of the speakers for the Hot Stove League banquet in 2007, and I had a chance to talk to him before the banquet.
“I really enjoyed playing here in Williamsport for the Grays in 1962. We had a great team, and the fans here were great,” Allen said. “We won the regular season pennant by something like 20 games before being beat by Elmira in the playoffs.”
Allen told me that although his experience in Williamsport was, for the most part, positive, it was still sometimes hard for him and some of the other African-American ballplayers to find a place to stay. He said they sometimes stayed at the Lycoming Hotel (now the Genetti) or found a couple of boardinghouses to stay at after some hard searching.
Allen confirmed to me a story he had heard about three years ago from the late Rankin Johnson, former president of the Eastern League, who said that Allen asked him to contact Phillies officials to ask permission for him to play over the winter with the Williamsport Billies team of the Eastern Professional Basketball League. He said that John Quinn, Phils’ general manager at the time, said no because he did not want to see Allen jeopardize his career with a possible off-season injury. Allen had been a standout high school basketball player at Wampum in western Pennsylvania.
He talked nostalgically and fondly of that 1962 Grays team.
“We had a wonderful manager, Frank Lucchesi when I was here,” Allen said. “He taught me a lot, as well as the rest of the guys on the team. It was a tough league that year; there were some great players playing it, especially pitchers such as Tommy John, Dave McNally, Luis Tiant, and Wilbur Wood. I was just beaten out for the batting title by Jim Ray Hart, who later starred for San Francisco, and Ken Harrelson was quite a slugger that year as well.”
Allen said the playoff disappointment of 1962 gave him a foretaste of an even greater disappointment: the Phillies’ pennant race collapse in 1964 when they had a 6 1/2 game lead with about ten games to go.
I was very pleased with Allen’s election. He was one of my all-time favorite ballplayers, and you always had a sense of anticipation that he could put one out each time he appeared at the plate. He provided many great baseball thrills for many people, including those who had the pleasure of seeing him play at Bowman Field in 1962. His fans always knew he was a Hall-of-Famer, and now it is formalized.
