I was fortunate to be in StL during Allen's one season as a Redbird & saw many of his games.Farfromgeneva wrote: ↑Sun Oct 10, 2021 6:47 am Baseball is messed up. Dick Allen was a superior ball player to almost all the clowns who runs their mouths.
Read Crash as a teenager and he became my favorite player I never saw play. Even met him once and paid for an autograph because he started doing that but when I got to him in the line I just shook his hand because that’s what he said he wanted
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytime ... d.amp.html
It was a tactical error for Gussie Busch to trade him because he had held out.
He had a good year & was appreciated by the StL fans.
https://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2020/12/9/ ... dick-allen
Allen got his wish for a fresh start in St. Louis. When he arrived, he found a clubhouse ruled by Bob Gibson and a fanbase which welcomed his talents.
As Allen stepped to the plate for his first at-bat in St. Louis, the crowd greeted him with a 90-second standing ovation.
“I didn’t know how to react,” Allen said in his autobiography. “I’d been playing in anger with the boos for so long. I kept stepping in and out of the batter’s box. I tipped my hat once, but the cheers kept coming. I stepped out again and tipped my hat again. I was trying to keep my composure, but tears kept filling my eyes. All those angry seasons in Philadelphia had taken their toll, but the cheers made me feel like a teenager.
“Afterward one of the Cardinals writers told me that it was the most sustained ovation he’d ever heard in St. Louis. ‘You’d have thought Musial had come out of retirement’ is the way he put it.”
Allen put up his usual eye-popping numbers that season, posting a .279 / .377 / .560 slash line and 34 HRs. But his season essentially ended with a severe hamstring pull on August 25.
His holdout in spring training had likely already sealed his fate with Gussie Busch. Just after the season, he was traded - dumped, really - to the Dodgers for Ted Sizemore and Bob Stinson.
One year later, Busch would trade Steve Carlton in much the same manner. The 1970s were a rare low point for the Cardinals organization. Imagine what they could have been had ownership not dumped Dick Allen and Steve Carlton for simply demanding to be paid what they were worth? While the racial climate in St. Louis may have been much better than Philadelphia, baseball owners everywhere still clung to that reserve clause and the right to treat each player as, what Flood famously called, “a well-paid slave.”
In the opening pages of Dick Allen’s autobiography is a quote which, when you understand how the man lived his life, sums up Allen nicely:
To be nobody but myself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
