He’s Still a Hit With Horsehide : But Ex-Major Leaguer Hank Allen Figures to Strike Out With His Longshot in Kentucky Derby

Baseball’s contribution to the 115th Kentucky Derby has been reduced by one former ballplayer, and Hank Allen, the remaining ex-player in the picture, probably would be better off if the race were decided with a ball, bat and glove instead of with horses.

Allen, trainer of longshot Northern Wolf, will still be running his horse Saturday at Churchill Downs, but Chuck Tanner, the former big-league player and manager and principal owner of Majesty’s Imp, lost his chance because of a knee injury to the colt. Majesty’s Imp has a bone chip in his left knee and he was sent to Keeneland, 75 miles away, for arthroscopic surgery.

“I was looking forward to seeing Chuck and running against his horse,” said Allen, who played for Tanner with the Chicago White Sox in 1973.

Northern Wolf is coming to the Derby off a victory in a minor stakes at Pimlico, but he has been running inconsistently as a 3-year-old. He has competed this year on the Maryland-New Jersey circuit, against horses not nearly as good as Easy Goer and Sunday Silence, the two colts who will be favored Saturday.

Majesty’s Imp also would have been a longshot, had he been able to run. He won a couple of minor races early this year at the Fair Grounds, but was third, second and fifth in his last three starts, the most recent of which was the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland last month.

Northern Wolf will be like the Washington Senators of this year’s Derby. He won’t be drawing much of a crowd--at the betting windows. Allen, 48, broke into the majors with the hapless Senators before they left Washington.

Tanner, 59, played for eight years in the majors and managed 18 seasons before the Atlanta Braves fired him early last season. He remains on the club’s payroll through 1991.

Tanner the manager never met a club he didn’t like, and his positive attitude has carried over to racing. He still thinks that Easy Goer, the heavy Derby favorite, can be beaten Saturday.

“There were 64 teams in the NCAA basketball tournament this year, and nobody picked Michigan to win it all,” Tanner said. “Sandy Koufax is in the Hall of Fame, and I wasn’t that much of a hitter, but I once got a hit off him. And when I managed the (Pittsburgh) Pirates, nobody gave us much chance against the (Baltimore) Orioles in the 1979 World Series, but we beat them.

“I’m just sorry we won’t be able to run in the race, because I think that last race helped our horse--he had been off for more than 40 days--and you don’t get an opportunity to run in the Derby very often. But we’ve got to take care of the horse.”

Tanner’s baseball career, which started in 1946, took him to 19 towns, from Evansville, Ind., to Atlanta. In 1960 and 1961, he played for Toronto in the International League. The owner of the club was Jack Kent Cooke, who now owns the Washington Redskins. This year, Cooke is running his first Derby horse, Flying Continental.

This is the first time in 43 years that Tanner has been out of baseball. He said there have been offers, but with the Braves’ money still coming in, he can afford to be discerning. There are reports in Cincinnati that Tanner might be in line to manage the Reds should Pete Rose be suspended as the result of a gambling investigation.

“Replacing Pete is premature talk,” Tanner said. “Right now, the only thing I’m hoping is that he’s found innocent, because anything else would be real bad for baseball.”

Tanner was fascinated by horses early on, once raced some cheap stock with pitcher Jim Kaat, and nurtured his affinity for the sport when he worked for Dan Galbreath and his late brother, John, the prominent Kentucky breeders who owned the Pirates. During contract negotiations in Pittsburgh, Tanner was able to obtain rights to a few Galbreath stallions, and Majesty’s Imp is the result of a breeding to His Majesty that cost $73,500.

Majesty’s Imp’s career probably is not over. His best race was a second-place finish to then-undefeated Dispersal in the Louisiana Derby on March 12. The two colts had a rematch in the Lexington but neither won, Dispersal aggravating a sore shin and taking himself out of the Derby.

Allen, who played a total of seven years with the Senators, White Sox and Milwaukee Brewers, had a career batting average of .241, 20 points under Tanner’s.

Allen grew up in Wampum, a Western Pennsylvania town not far from New Castle, where Tanner has always lived. Two of Allen’s brothers also made the majors. Dick, a slugger who hit 351 home runs, lives in Los Angeles and owns the stallion Briar Bend. Ron, Hank’s stable foreman, hit a home run in only a few big league at-bats. Coy Allen, the oldest of the nine Allen children, played in the old Negro leagues.

“I guess you could say I was an outfielder,” Hank Allen said, laughing. “A lot of people who saw me play referred to me as something less.”

When Allen retired from baseball in 1973, a broadcasting job he hoped for never materialized. He taught school for a while but realized that horses might be a second career when a colleague kept slipping copies of the Daily Racing Form under his classroom door.

Allen went to Chicago to work for a trainer who had some horses owned by brother Dick. In 1975, in Maryland, he claimed a horse for $5,000 and got his own stable operation going. His best year was 1986, when his horses earned more than $500,000.

Black trainers, like black jockeys, are rare in racing. Ed Brown trained two early Derby winners--Baden-Baden in 1877 and Ben Brush in 1896.

Allen, though, doesn’t see himself as a ground breaker, pointing out that his teacher in Chicago, Nate Cantrell, was still training horses when he was 97. Allen also notes that Oscar Dishman trained horses that won several $100,000 races in the 1970s.

Allen started a horse in the Preakness in 1985, his Sparrowvon finishing eighth. Northern Wolf will be hard pressed to do as well in the Derby, but Allen is making no apologies for being here.

“It wouldn’t be a Derby if just one horse ran in it,” Allen said, referring to Easy Goer. “This is what makes horse racing, the competition.”

The graying, affable Allen may be drawing more people to his Churchill Downs barn than turned out to watch the Senators in Washington.

“When I left baseball, they threw a retirement party and nobody came,” he said, laughing.

If Northern Wolf has an inferiority complex about beating Easy Goer, Sunday Silence and the others on Saturday, he’s in the right hands, and it would be one of those rare occasions in racing when the owners are more qualified than the trainer. Northern Wolf is owned by three psychiatrists.