Dick Allen — smoker, All-Star, activist, eternal bon vivant. If you’re reading (or writing) these electronic pages, you either secretly wish that you were Dick Allen, or you publicly wish that you were Dick Allen. Well. Good news for all of us: this summer, NotGraphs Press will release its first publication, Be Your Own Dick Allen, designed to help even the most Cistullian among us to access our inner Dicks.

Inside the above very handsome volume, readers will find fashion advice, hot takes on tobacco products, a sleeve of pine-tar paper, best practices for loins-bearing and all-star hitting, and inspirational quotes designed to help you achieve maximum Dick Allen-ness in everyday life, just to name a few treats.

To whet your appetites for this groundbreaking publication — as if your appetites for things Dick Allen were in need of whetting — we share below a few of those quotes from the aura (if not from the actual mouth) of Dick Allen himself.

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In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

In today’s episode, we learn, in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that Dick Allen is forever.

“Montag.” Granger took Montag’s shoulder firmly. “Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes. See how important you’ve become in the last minute!”
“But I’ve forgotten!”
“No, nothing’s ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you.”
“But I’ve tried to remember!”
“Don’t try. It’ll come when we need it. All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there. Simmons here has worked on it for twenty years and now we’ve got the method down to where we can recall anything that’s been read once. Would you like, some day, Montag, to read Plato’s Republic?
“Of course!”
“I am Plato’s Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus.”
“How do you do?” said Mr. Simmons.
“Hello,” said Montag.
“I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Dick Allen and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
Everyone laughed quietly.
“It can’t be, said Montag.
“It is,” replied Granger smiling.

This has been the latest episode of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.

The Dodgers 1970 scouting report of Dick Allen:

Dick Allen doesn’t need a country. Doesn’t need a position. His country is his steely gaze. His position is that you should go to hell with your judgments.

He’ll fill those holes in his bat when he God-damn feels like it. Dick Allen is tired of you reporting on his potential, too. Go to the next man, see if he cares. (Author’s note: Allen was traded to the Dodgers the year after this report was written.)

You don’t win Rookie of the Year and become an All-Star by pushing cars downhill, dickweed. Cars need to go up. Dick Allen is the man to make that happen.

(Report provided by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.)

In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

In today’s episode, Mr. Dick Allen wanders into one of Christendom’s sacred texts — the Old Testament, which, much like Dr. Pepper Ten, is not for women.

A reading from 2 Kings 2:23-24, New International Version …

Elisha Is Jeered

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then Dick Allen came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

This has been the latest episode of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.

It’s time to revive a fan favorite. That’s right, it’s another installment of Inserting Dick Allen’s name into works of literature. Because if there’s one thing America needs more than Hot Effing Sports Opinions™, it’s Dick Allen.

Today, we cover J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little Dick Allens playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little Dick Allens, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch every Dick Allen if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch Dick Allen. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher of the Dick Allens and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

The author can certainly relate.

Dedicated to my main man, Dayn Perry.

Think of anything that challenges your moderating instincts, any signifier of the good life lived. Whatever that thing is, Dick Allen was through with it before you knew what to do with it.

Now shut up, sit down, genuflect, and watch as your better heaves a ceremonial first pitch for a strike as effortlessly as he once flicked aside mewling baby racists during the Hale, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hale Administrations …

And now a relevant excerpt from Philip Kaufman’s screenplay “The Right Stuff,” adapted from the Tom Wolfe opus of the same name:

Unknown: Is that a man?
Jack Ridley: You damn right it is.

Wampum.

Longtime readers of NotGraphs — and also anyone who’s visited NotGraphs even just once in their entire life — will know that, if the present site were to have something in the way of a patron saint, then the leading candidates for that role would be Dick Allen and Bob Uecker, the former because he’s a leisured gentleman; the latter, because he’s an equally leisured gentleman.

Indeed, it should surprise zero of us to learn not only that Allen and Uecker were teammates (for the 1966 and 1967 Phillies), but that they were also (a) close friends, (b) the authors, together, of no little merriment, and (c) the recipients, together, of multiple fines.

The pair reunited on air Sunday, with Allen in Chicago as part of a celebration of the 1972 White Sox (with which team and in which season he won the AL MVP award) and Uecker in Chicago in his capacity as the Brewers’ radio voice.

To say that Allen and Uecker burst into song during the former’s 5th inning appearance on WTMJ Radio would both (a) sound like a flight of whimsy on the part of the author and (b) be an accurate description of what actually happened.

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Shout-out to Dayn Perry.

In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

Today’s episode: In the afterword of Rohinton Mistry’s brilliant first novel, Such A Long Journey, Alberto Manguel writes, “Dick Allen is a creature doomed.” Aren’t we all?

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Dick Allen surrounded by … Allen wrenches!

Allen wrenches! Although, I suppose, if one were so inclined, one could view the above adornments as peckers of a certain crudity — “dicks,” in the parlance of the Teenage Thunderclaps who roam the streets of America in defiance of local curfews — but, no. No, these are Allen wrenches. Dick Allen is surrounded by Allen wrenches.

And may I say he seems content to watch them go by. “This is not so bad,” he seems to be saying. “I’m going to hang with these wrenches for a while and then go do something amazing.”

Courtesy of the drop-dead gorgeous Chris Cwik comes this Polaroid snapped on game day deep in the bowels of Modern Telephone Concern Sports Enclosure:

I have taken it upon myself to use Les Couleurs to obscure the faces of the two demonstrably less compelling White Socked base-and-ball-ists in this daguerreotype (is that Stan Damned Bahnsen on the far right?) and will instead allow the reader’s eyes to feast, in Old Country Buffet-fashion, upon Dick Allen and Dick Allen alone.

Are you not uplifted by this? If you are, then please pay it forward on this fine day by vanquishing someone of poor taste and breeding.