Although long awaited, Dick Allen and Dave Parker enter the Baseball Hall of Fame together

Forty-seven years after he played his last game and two years and one day after he took his last breath, Dick Allen is a member of the Hall of Fame. Thirty-three years after his last game and 12 years after a tremor in his right hand finally led to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, Dave Parker is a Hall of Famer.

Allen and Parker have a shared history, so it’s fitting that they’ll be enshrined together next summer. Both were among the best hitters of their generation, hitting the ball so hard that they posed threats in the batter’s box. Both became the highest-paid baseball players (Allen in 1973, Parker six years later). Both were led at the peak of their powers by Chuck Tanner, a man who allowed them to flourish by treating them with respect when others did not. Both suffered openly from racial prejudice. Both have endured waits for the Hall not unlike their careers: long and difficult.

On Sunday, the Classic Era committee corrected long omissions by acknowledging that Allen and Parker had been underestimated all these years, especially during their careers. Parker was named on 14 of the committee’s 16 ballots and Allen on 13 of them – clear favorites on a strong ballot. Of the maximum 48 votes, Parker, Allen and third-place Tommy John (seven votes, five before the election) accounted for 71 percent of the highest number of votes possible.

Allen had lost a voice twice before. His credentials included the highest OPS+ (156) of all non-Hall, non-PED connected hitters (min. 1700 games). During his first 11 full seasons (1964 to 1974), he led the majors in OPS+ (165). The players behind him? Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Henry Aaron. He swung a 42-ounce bat viciously.

Allen spent 15 years on the writers’ ballot and never got up to 20% support. What hurt Allen was his reputation for disrupting clubs. During a six-year period from 1969 to 1975, Allen was traded five times. Sabermetrician Bill James wrote 30 years ago: “He did more than anyone to keep his team from winning, and if he’s a Hall of Famer, I’m a wheel nut.” » What most people missed or chose to ignore was the turmoil and racism that Allen faced as one of the Phillies’ first black stars.

In 1963, when Allen was 21, the Phillies assigned him to Triple-A Arkansas. Allen, who grew up in western Pennsylvania, later wrote that he begged the Phillies not to send him there. He had never been to the South, and he knew Little Rock was a cauldron of racial unease. When he arrived for the opening day on April 17, 1963, Allen was greeted by white supremacists protesting outside the stadium. The Associated Press reported: “This game was the first non-segregated baseball game in Little Rock, and several hundred blacks were part of the crowd that watched Governor Orval E. Faubus throw out the first pitch. » Faubus was the same man who, six years earlier, had refused to conform Brown v. School Board and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to ban black students from attending Little Rock Central High.

When Allen joined the Phillies later that same year, he discovered more racial animosity at his stadium and in his home state. The Phillies were the last National League team to integrate. They fielded all-white teams until 1957, exactly a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, when they gave shortstop John Kennedy a brief tryout. In 1965, Allen and white teammate Frank Thomas got into a fight in the clubhouse. The Phillies released Thomas, but many fans blamed Allen.

Over the years, Allen endured so much abuse from fans, including objects thrown at him, that he began wearing a helmet on the field.

Like Allen, Parker faced verbal abuse and flying objects, even at his baseball stadium. Anger directed at him grew in January 1979, after winning a second straight batting title and the MVP award, Parker signed a five-year contract that paid him just under $1 million a year, making him the highest paid player in baseball. (Ten months later, Nolan Ryan would cross the $1 million mark by signing as a free agent with the Astros.)

It was the beginning of the free agent era, a time of rising salaries and growing resentment from fans. Parker became a target because, as great as he is — “He’s the best player in the world,” Tanner said — no one is great all the time. Pittsburgh fans booed Parker. (The same treatment was evident to Mike Schmidt in Philadelphia the previous season.) In 1979, Parker’s car was vandalized in the Three Rivers Stadium parking lot. Three times someone broke into his house. People sent him racist letters full of epithets and telling him to “go back to black Africa.” Parker kept these letters and postcards.

“It gives me inspiration,” he explained, “When I’m tired, I look at them.”

The following year, a fan at Three Rivers Stadium threw a drum at him while he was playing right field. He got so close to her head that he heard her hiss.

“You pay your money, you have the right to do something, verbally,” he said after the incident. “But this… this is becoming unbearable. If this continues, I will not be able to continue my career.

Meanwhile, Parker had demons off the field that would not reveal themselves until the infamous Pittsburgh drug trials of 1985. Parker testified that he used cocaine from 1976 to 1982, sometimes facilitating access to his supplier to the Pirates clubhouse and plane. By then, Parker’s great skills were eroding. Parker averaged 4.6 WAR in his first seven years, but dropped to 0.7 per year over the next three after his MVP season.

“I stopped using at the end of 1982,” Parker testified. “I felt like my game was slipping and I feel like that played a part in it.”

Parker played for nine more years. Although he did not return to his elite prowess of the late 1970s, during this second stage of his career he made three All-Star teams, finished as a top-five MVP in voting twice, won his first RBI title and became a club leader with the Reds, A’s (where he won a World Series in 1989), Brewers, Angels and, briefly, Blue Jays. Teams continued to recruit Parker because he could still hit and he knew how to keep a team open. Parker was a renowned wit who spoke his mind, like the time someone asked him about the Pirates possibly facing Montreal Expos left-hander Bill Lee.

“Bill Lee opposing us is like walking into a lion’s den in a hamburger costume,” he roared.

Allen and Parker dealt with the hostility directed against them in different ways. Allen was more of a loner who stewed after slights. He left the White Sox two weeks before the end of the 1974 season due to a feud with a teammate. Although Allen won the home run title that year, Chicago sold his contract to the Braves. He refused to introduce himself. He retired at age 33. The Phillies talked him out of retiring. He played three more seasons, largely part-time. Parker was gregarious and outspoken, often the loudest man in the room and with a smile on his face.

Allen and Parker waited too long to get their due, especially with Allen being honored posthumously and Parker battling Parkinson’s disease. But it just seems like when it finally happened, they were in the same class. With this honor, those who have never seen them play especially need to discover their stories. There is so much that Allen and Parker share in the way they played baseball. And how much they endured.