Letters in the Dirt, Echoes from the Heart.

The best baseball songs celebrate the game’s oddball and underdog characters (as opposed to the greatest players of all-time). Chuck Brodsky’s “Letters in the Dirt” is ode to a giant of a character… and is included in my all-time best baseball song list (click here to see my Baseball DJ Spotify list) first baseman Dick Allen (most notably of the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago White Sox). Richie “Dick” Allen was a 7 time All-Star, the 1972 AL MVP, 1964 NL Rookie of the Year, and two-time AL HR leader.

Although his uniform number (15) was retired by the Phillies in 2020, Dick Allen was one vote shy of being elected to the National Baseball Hall-of Fame. Phuck.

Allen, one of the game’s most controversial figures of the 60’s and 70s’, was known for using the heaviest bat imaginable (42-ounces) and hitting moon-rocket upper decks blasts. Click here to the Washington Post’s tribute to Dick Allen just after his death at the age of 78.

The “Dick Allen HOF” website includes an article about the night in 1969 Allen wrote the letters BOO in the dirt while on first base (click here to read).

BUT, this story is not about Dick Allen. It is about Chuck Brodsky’s touching song “Letters in the Dirt” (1996).

Brodsky (website) is the world’s most prolific active baseball songs writer with several baseball song albums. His “Baseball Ballads” release in 2007 has ten original songs including “Letters in the Dirt” (click here to listen on Spotify). “Baseball Ballads 2” was released in 2013 (click here to listen on Spotify) and features a dozen more baseball songs about the game’s characters and mystic, including “Disco Demolition Night” (a subject for a future article).

I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Chuck in his Asheville, NC home and talking baseball. He is a featured interview #40 in the Music People Project (click here to visit the site or just watch below.) Of special baseball and music note, National Baseball Hall of Fame President, Josh Rawitch, was also interviewed for the Music People Project. It is a must watch (click here to view)!

Here is a live clip of Chuck’s great song to enjoy…

Here are the words…

______________________

Me & you, we never booed Richie Allen
I never understood why people did
He hit a homer every time he stepped up to the plate That’s what I remember as a kid

Richie in the field out there by first base
The target of some mighty foul words
With his shoes he’d scrawl between the pitched
“B-O-O” in great big letters in the dirt

Philly fans, they’ve been known to get nasty
When Joe must go, they’ll run him out of town
I saw Santa get hit by a snowball
And then get hit again when he was down

Me & you, we never booed Richie Allen
Even if he did sometimes strike out
I was too young to read the papers
To know what all that booing was about

That big collapse of ‘64 was ugly
They blew a lead of 6 and one-half games with 12 to play. Some might say their fans were justifiably angry World Series tickets printed up in vain

Philly fans, they’ve been known to get nasty
When Joe must go, they’ll run him out of town
I saw Santa get hit by a snowball
And then get hit again when he was down

Going back to old Connie Mack Stadium
You teaching me the rules of the game
We root-root-rooted for the home team
Those other people should’ve been ashamed

This was before the days of the million dollar contracts
Before the days of the artificial grass
He stood a bit outside the lines which made him fair game for those times
Richie Allen never kissed a white man’s ass

Me & you, we never booed Richie Allen
No, we’d pound our mitts & we’d yell, “We want a hit”
How could they call a guy a bum after he’d just hit a home run?
That didn’t make any sense to a kid

Now I’ve since found out all these days later
Now I know a lot more than I did
And if back then you knew, Daddy, why all those other people booed…
Thanks for letting me have my heroes as a kid