# 24 Bob Allen - Pitcher of the Cleveland Indians.

Here are the front and backs of one of the cards I saw most often as a kid. I always had a pair of these Bob Allen cards. One was kept in the set, the other was kept in my collection of cards. It never turned up where it was supposed to be, with my other '67 doubles! More often than I can to remember, that eye sore of a Indians baseball cap turned up in piles of '88 Donruss or '90 Fleer cards (so, maybe I wasn't so organized). Look at the card, and tell me what strikes you first. It's that darn hat! It must be.

 These Indian cards are very much the same as the Cardinal cards and here, we see how the Topps designers chose their color schemes for at least players wearing red uniforms. The light blue lettered team name in the foreground against the very red uniform and hat. The Topps designers also chose this color for the Red Sox (also uniforms with red).

I never knew anything about this player. His career in the majors was brief. He never pitched in the majors again after 1967. His time was spent entirely in the bullpen. While there, he did see alot of action. 274 innings pitched in 204 games. He finished 84 but only managed 19 saves in his career. Saves weren't made the way they are now. If you were in to close a game, you sometimes pitched 3 or even more innings. Today, the closing specialists pitch a single inning.  This is great for the salaries of these specialists but it is also invaluable to the team because the less time you see the pitcher, the harder it is to figure him out. This isn't so hard to do when a pitcher is out there for three innings and the entire lineup faces him during that game. This may or may not be the reason why Bob Allen finished his career with a losing 7-12 record. Ironically, he had hs best ERA in his last season. He went 0-5 but had a solid 2.98

I assumed from his Major League stats that he threw out his arm but it does look like he had a long minor league career after 1967, If he did have that injury, it came in '72 while pitching in the Padres farm system.

Allen was featured in the '62, '63, '64, '66, '67 and though he was done in the Majors, was in the '68 Topps sets. For some reason, Topps claims Bob Allen was a Pirate in their 1964 set though he apparently never spent a day pitching within their organization.  An odd, little know uncorrected error card.