dick allen is in my hall of famer collection

he may not be enshrined in cooperstown (yet), but i have added dick/rich/richie allen to my hall of famer collection with this card as his entry:

that is a 2001 fleer greats of the game autograph card. here's the back:

the card refers to him as richie, and he signed as rich, but i think he is probably most often referred to as dick.

he was rich allen on his 1971 topps card that was such a mystery to me as a young collector. i had never seen one until i went to a card show in los angeles circa 1982 where i found a dealer who had a complete 1971 set in a binder. i turned to the page with card number 650 on it and was blown away by the sight of the card. still, i didn't buy that card until i was in college. it was late fall in 1988 and i happened to check out a hobby store in my university town. i knew that the place was mostly non-collectible hobby oriented, but i figured what the heck.

to my surprise, there in a case on the wall was a 1971 topps rich allen card. i ran back to my car to get my checkbook and stood in line scared to death that one of the customers in front of me was going to ask for the card before i could get to the counter. well, nobody did and i finally had a complete run of topps flagship dodgers from 1970 through 1987. it was a great day.

anyway, allen is now a part of my hall of famer collection, too, and it's not because his high number 1971 topps card showed him as a dodger and was such a huge card for me to acquire. rather, he is in the collection because of my subjective appreciation of his career which included an mvp award, a rookie of the year award, 351 home runs and well over 1,000 runs scored and rbi. realistically, he is a borderline hall of famer and even fails my general hits+walks>3,000 criteria. still, he was consistently a top-10 offensive player throughout the majority of his career and modern metrics such as ops and ops+ show him as a better player than he was perhaps given credit for during his career and bbwaa voting period.

 

sometimes i will post these cards on a certain day for a reason - like last week's satchel paige post - and so i was looking for a link between allen and today's date, and the best i could find is that he hit the 310th home run of his career on july 16 - back in 1974. the truth is, i had waited long enough to formally add allen to my hall of famer collection and today is as good a day as any!

you can see allen and the rest of the members of my hall of famer collection here!