My favorite player as a young kid.
Comiskey Park was where power went to die. The center field wall sat 445 feet from home plate and stood fifteen feet tall, and for most of the ballpark's life it simply could not be reached. Then Dick Allen arrived in 1972 with a 40-ounce bat and started rearranging what people thought was possible on the South Side.
On August 23 of that year, with Harry Caray broadcasting from the center field bleachers as he did on Wednesday afternoons, Allen turned on a pitch from Lindy McDaniel and dropped it seven rows deep, a few seats from Caray's fish net. He became the fourth man in the history of the ballpark to do it. Foxx. Greenberg. Alex Johnson. Allen. The following May he put one off the tower platform on the left field roof and out of the building entirely.
That season he hit .308 with 37 home runs and 113 RBI, won the MVP, and pulled a franchise back from the edge of leaving town. Attendance had cratered. Roland Hemond said flatly that Allen saved the White Sox, and nobody who was there has ever argued the point.
Here is the part that gets left out. In Philadelphia they called him Richie for years, on the roster, on the scorecards, on his baseball cards, long after he had told them his name was Dick. He said it made him sound ten years old. Chicago called him what he asked to be called. It is a small thing that was never small, and it is part of why the South Side got the best version of him.
He was inducted into the Hall of Fame on July 27, 2025, four and a half years after his death. The people in those Comiskey seats had it figured out fifty years earlier.
