Richard Allen Jr. thought this finally would be the year for his father.
Dick Allen fell one vote short of being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by a committee in 2014, and the former Chicago White Sox slugger and 1972 American League MVP was again up for consideration Sunday to be awarded one of the game’s highest honors.
Twenty-five of Allen’s relatives and friends gathered for a watch party in Orlando, Fla., where the Hall of Fame’s Golden Days Era committee met. One by one, the elected players — Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso and Tony Oliva — were revealed in alphabetical order on MLB Network by Hall of Fame President Josh Rawitch.
As each player’s accomplishments were detailed before the name was announced, it quickly became apparent to Allen Jr.’s son, Richard Allen III, that the voting wasn’t going to turn out as they hoped.
“He’s whispering to me, ‘Pop-Pop didn’t get in,’” Allen Jr. recalled.
The 16-person Golden Days Era committee spent Sunday considering the resumes of 10 players whose primary contributions to the game came between 1950 and 1969. Each committee member could vote for up to four players, with 12 votes needed for election.
Allen again finished one vote shy of enshrinement. In 2014, he and Oliva received 11 votes, Kaat got 10 and Miñoso nine. Hodges got three or fewer votes that year.
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Allen Jr. said “the air just started going out of the balloon” Sunday night when everyone realized what had occurred. Allen Jr. was in San Diego for the 2014 winter meetings and attended the news conference that revealed none of the eligible players had been voted in.
“This one hurt worse than 2014, maybe because it happened twice and by the same amount of votes,” Allen Jr. said to the Tribune. “I didn’t even know what to say. … To be honest, I was really angry the rest of the night. I mean, I had visions of taking something and throwing it across the room.”
A day later, Allen Jr. had calmed down, but like many who expressed their feelings on social media, he remained disheartened that one elusive vote again kept his father out of the Hall of Fame.
The lack of transparency and explanation from the committee makes it tough too. The winter meetings were canceled this year because of the lockout, so there was no news conference with committee members like in 2014 in which some insight perhaps could be gleaned about the group’s thought process.
“At least you got some type of feedback or a little bit of closure,” Allen Jr. said of the 2014 vote. “But this way it’s like, here are the people that are in, thank you and good night.”
Willa Allen, Dick Allen’s wife of 33 years, described being very disappointed by the outcome.
However, she was not surprised.
“He wasn’t a conformist; he was anything but that,” she told the Tribune Tuesday on the one-year anniversary of Dick Allen’s death at 78. “He was his own person no matter what. In a way, he was an introvert, but he believed firmly in what he believed in, and that’s what he was going to stand for.
“During the ‘60s, of course, Black players had to stay in their place, and that definitely was not Dick. … He had a battle with the league and everything that at that time they represented that he thought was unfair. I think he’s been punished for that.”
Allen’s offensive production and prodigious power in a career that spanned 15 years with five teams — most notably the Philadelphia Phillies and White Sox — puts him among the best hitters of his era.