OF DICK AND DEV: AN ANTI-CLIMACTIC SENSE OF AN ENDING

LET us begin with two endings: the final steps of a Kafkaesque journey to posthumous redemption, and the sudden, all-too-anonymous conclusion of a brilliant but sadly squandered life. Much treachery and tragedy intervened in the events leading to these sobering anti-climaxes, some (if not most) of it self-inflicted: but these two men--the "notorious" Dick Allen and the "flamboyant" Brock Hanke--spent too many years of their lives diminished by a particularly virulent form of insiderism that continues to plague the world of baseball. 

Thus shall it ever be so. Here we write often about the opening up of vistas that few if any (want to) see, perspectives that began half a century ago when a cynical-yet-idealistic seventeen-year-old went to college and bonded with a draft-dodging denizen of the hippie demimonde with prodigious and protean skills who reeked of endlessly provocative opinions. 

That was Hanke (pronounced "hank-y"), who anointed me into his loopy world when I professed affection and support for an embattled slugger who didn't want to be called "Richie." 

DURING the balance of the 1970s, our allegiance to a pre-Bill James "sabermetric" approach to baseball deepened, eventually leading us into a variable association with Bill's 1980s efforts to create a blanketed play-by-play capability (Project Scoresheet). It would also lead to Hanke's (temporary) anointment as the successor to Bill's Baseball Abstract (until Bill pulled the rug out from under him).

All through that period, as we developed our own mythical world (assorted tales of the San Antonio Trotters, a form of "sabermetric wish fulfillment" blown up from our days of wrangling in intramural softball), one axis of our foundational beliefs was in the conjoined greatness and martyrdom of Dick Allen, whose career took a series of dramatic and confounding turns until it came to a sudden, anti-climactic end in 1977. (As we rewrote the landscape of baseball via the Trotters in those days, we naturally found a way to include Dick on that team, which had progressed from rag-tag to dynastic in the intervening years: as a prestige platoon player, "Big Dick"--as Hanke liked to call him--upped his lifetime HR total much closer to 400 before "officially" retiring at the end of the decade.)

The liaison with Bill James started then (it was actually yours truly who discovered him first, being one of a few hundred who purchased his self-published 1978 edition), but it was Hanke and his applied math background that confirmed the essential efficacy of Bill's early work, which led to our years of producing baseball annuals in the 1990s, which were subverted by what has now become more of a plague on the game than a means to its transformation. The true scandal of "sabermetrics" is how it has undermined baseball even as it purports to anatomize it, and how it became an instrument of an ever-more invidious form of insiderism.

SUCH behavior was first exposed by Bill James in his cynical, overblown Politics of Glory, which unceremoniously combined new numerical formulations with callous muckracking, skewering baseball's Hall of Fame in ways both rightful and reprehensible. In an age (mid-1990s) when new statistical measures (OPS, OPS+) were opening eyes to the hidden accomplishments of hitters long shunned by Cooperstown, James took out a contract on Dick Allen and shot him down with a series of pronouncements that deserved a libel suit. 

Even though some of James' long-time allies/colleagues took up against him, the damage done to Allen's chances for statistical reconsideration (and enshrinement in the Hall of Fame) was epochal.

James' behavior became the template for a new flavor of "sabermetrics" which would fire hot for a decade until generational change permitted the "outsiders" to become "insiders." (James himself helped spawn this movement when he took a job with the Boston Red Sox, being the first of many to make the world safe for sabermetrics, but not necessarily vice-versa.)

Prior to that, Bill's second edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract (2001) employed his Win Shares method (moving "beyond" the Wins Above Replacement method he'd created in the 1980s, a tool that Hanke inserted into his 1989 Baseball Abstract, unwittingly setting in motion a process that would turn the measure into a lightning rod for insiderist "culture wars" that continue to persist). The results of the Win Shares method produced some inconvenient truths--one of which was that, according to James' own measures, Dick Allen (even with his relatively short, injury-riddled career) had cleared the bar for induction into the Hall of Fame.

James' response to this was to hint that Allen's "psychological problems" had caused him to squander a level of talent equal to that of the game's greatest players (oddly, limited to other African-Americans such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson), which apparently constituted grounds for ongoing skepticism about his suitability for Cooperstown. When pressed further, James noted that Allen's eventual admission was "inevitable" and that he'd simply look the other way regarding whatever the "insiders" did. 

Meanwhile, the Wins Above Replacement method managed to target Dick as well: its distorted defensive calculations produced a penalty that was virtually unique, dropping his "overall" score into a range where ruby-throated "sabermetric" chirpers could make unctuous ululations reiterating his "marginal" status for induction. 

All of this kept in play a lingering uncertainty that prevented the "new numbers" (per Jayson Stark, in a rare disingenuous moment) from crashing through to give "Crash" (Allen's nickname, given to him due to the sound of what happened when his 42-ounce bat met the baseball) the needed cred to make it through baseball's ultimate insider kluge, the umpteen-times-shuffled-off-to-Buffalo "Veterans Committee."

Dick became philosophical about his ongoing banishment, beginning with his autobiography (appropriately enough, entitled Crash!)--over the years, he did what he could to mend fences, knowing that whatever outcome would ensue was out of his hands. He was gracious, grateful and moving when the Baseball Reliquary inducted him into its Shrine of the Eternals (who, a few years later, would create one of their typical "strange bedfellows" situations by inducting Bill James!)

Meanwhile, in response to the media shift and his own incipient health issues, Brock Hanke absented himself from the "real world" cauldron of baseball opinion, opting for an association with the Hall of Merit, a cadre of individualist systematizers who devised their own (and more convenient) rules of induction for an alternate baseball Hall of Fame. At my request, he made a half-hearted attempt to get that intriguing group to run a parallel experiment using the more draconian inductions standards imposed on the brick-and-mortar Hall of Fame (75% of the total vote). In two words: they declined.

AND likely you know the rest of Dick's story: missing induction via that ever-shifting committee in 2015 by one vote, then succumbing to cancer in December 2020 as another incarnation of insiders decided not to vote because COVID made it "too cumbersome" to operate in true insider fashion. And then, another stinging one-vote miss in 2021.

In 2022, Brock Hanke received some sobering news about his physical condition: he'd developed a weakness in his pulmonary system that would become more pronounced over time. Work he had done to address the problems in the Wins Above Replacement method--a project he'd fretted over for years--was again shelved without seeing the light of day. (This had been a lingering pattern for him over time as the escalating signals of his ultimate health issue affected his ability to physically function, an occurrence that seemed to make him gun-shy with respect to the increasingly "inside" world of advanced baseball statistics.) My attempts to engage him on such matters and to advocate that he make his findings public were not successful.

With a caretaker living with him in his suburban St. Louis home, he still sounded reasonably alert in February of 2024--the last time we were to speak. His stamina was clearly reduced: he begged off the call shortly after being reminded about my homage to his fictional self's Hall of Fame-level career that I'd reconstructed from our long-ago forays into what is now called "fan fiction." (Perhaps unsurprisingly, those texts had turned into another critique of Wins Above Replacement.) All in all, however, there was little indication of any imminent change in his condition.

Becoming involved in my efforts to wrap up that long-running French film noir project (occasionally referenced here), my opportunity to reach out to him was curtailed, and the summer passed into fall. After returning from the first of two "final finale" screening series in San Francisco in mid-October, it seemed to be a good time to reestablish contact. An email went unreturned (not an especially concerning event: Hanke was a notoriously poor correspondent). But then the attempts at reaching him by phone produced the troubling fact that his long-time land line at his home had been disconnected.

An initial search of the Internet did not produce an obituary, but a more specified query revealed that Brock Hanke (known to me always as "Dev"--his 1970s nickname) passed away on the thirty-first of May. A subsequent search produced a sound file from a sports radio show from just two days before his death where he'd made an appearance, where he definitely sounded diminished. (Few people were as verbally articulate as he was, and here he sounded--to use an "analog analogy"--like a 45rpm record being played at 33.)  And yet it's clear from the audio transcript that during his on-air chat time, Dev had little or no sense that he was about to pass away...

SO both men--Richard Anthony Allen and Brock Jay Hanke--did not survive long enough to see "Big Dick" finally crash through into the bubble-world of the hallowed. We put aside our lingering sense that perhaps the blemish of Allen's unjust absence from the Hall might still be an appropriate symbol for the hollowness at the center of its "hallowed halls," and we celebrate for his family, his friends, for those who resolutely championed him for so long, and for that long arc of justice (to reframe the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.) that finally bent toward mercy, forgiveness, vindication--and redemption. 

And yet it is a bittersweet, anti-climactic ending for both men--and for countless others like Hanke, who'd advocated and hoped and prayed for some form of intervention that would have brought the events of Sunday, December 8th, 2024 to us so much sooner, when so many more folks could share in the moment, when its potential for a form of healing bliss was so much more palpable. 

Many will remember Dick Allen, and that is all to the good. But few if any will remember Brock Hanke, and while some of that is on him, it is sobering to contemplate how so much talent can have so little tangible to show for it. Let's hope that wherever his essence might be at this moment, he is finding enjoyment in Allen's belated vindication. Farewell, my friend!