Dick Allen Preferred Not To: A Reconsideration of Baseball’s Bartleby

Dick Allen Preferred Not ToA Reconsideration of Baseball’s Bartleby Mitchell Nathanson (bio) “What I saw … persuaded me that [he] was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”1 Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” introduction During the course of his major-league career, Dick Allen did a lot of things: he was the 1964 nl Rookie of the Year and the 1972 al Most Valuable Player; his 351 home runs are more than Hall of Famer Ron Santo; his 1,119 RBI are more than Hall of Famer Rod Carew; and for those who pray at the alter of saber-metrics, his “adjusted ops+” is higher than the greatest slugger of all time, Hall of Famer Hank Aaron. Because of all that he did, the mlb Network in 2012 ranked him as a member of its “Top Ten Not in the Hall of Fame” (he was ranked number nine). However, despite all that he did, Dick Allen, like Melville’s Bartleby, is remembered more for what he preferred not to do: he preferred not to listen to his manager or follow the edicts of team and league officials; he preferred not to cooperate with reporters; occasionally he preferred not to inform anyone of his whereabouts; and at times he preferred not to play the most difficult sport of all, one which requires lightning-quick reflexes, pinpoint accuracy, and split-second decision making—all while forming a response to a hardball honing in with ill intent at over ninety miles per hour—without first stopping at a tavern or two (or three) on his way to the ballpark. Because of all that he did and all he preferred not to do, Allen became one of the most controversial players in the history of a game replete with them. As Sports Illustrated summed him up in 1970, “He is known as a man who hits a [End Page 1] baseball even harder than he hits the bottle. … Allen shakes the game’s Establishment and stirs up its followers as no other player can.”2 Because of what he did and what he preferred not to do, nearly every baseball fan with an opinion has a strong one when it comes to Dick Allen. Throughout the arc of his productive yet strange and oftentimes maddening career, and in the decades thereafter, the debate over who was ultimately to blame for the controversy that seemingly followed Allen wherever he went raged on, and rages still today. Were Allen’s repeated transgressions his fault? Team management’s? The media’s? The fans’? Who is responsible for the tragedy that was Dick Allen? For all of his talent, and despite how much his teammates seemed to like him wherever he went, who is to blame for the fact that no matter where his travels took him over the course of his fifteen-year career—Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia again, and Oakland—disharmony, dissension, disagreement, and disruption invariably came along for the ride? Why is it that one of the most talented players of his generation was summed up by the preeminent baseball historian Bill James as someone who “did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball”?3 This article attempts to examine Allen’s career through a unique lens—the one provided by Melville’s classic short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In so doing, this article will show that although Allen’s foibles were in many ways his own, they were also, perhaps in greater part, the inevitable result of a larger injustice perpetrated on the black athletes of the 1950s and ’60s—those players who emerged a generation after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 and who were compelled to endure the brutal racial double standard that arose in the wake of Dodger president Branch Rickey’s “Great Experiment.” In the end, through the lens of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the systemic injustice that preyed on Allen and that ultimately became...

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