Allen was a good athlete with a tight little motion, and Herzog considered him and Stearns the toughest battery to run on, and putting together the runningest offense anyone had seen in decades, had perhaps an outsized opinion of Neil. It seems uncharacteristically shortsighted for Herzog, but that's the kind of mistake you might make when you're trying to run a player out of town. It also speaks to what can happen when a manager runs the organization and the GM is just a figurehead. His heart got ahead of his head. Hernandez, to his credit, despite being famously loose-lipped, never really comes close to running Herzog down in the booth, despite being in a good position to do so. And I imagine that's because he knows his side of the truth, and that's that he developed a drug problem and it cost him his job. A pretty good job at that. Cocaine can cloud your judgment, but fear of it can do that as well. Herzog was trying to protect the rest of his team, committed to acting fast, and sold his player short. It blew up on him, but even a long, Hall of Fame career characterized by forward thinking and sound judgment is going to include a couple of gaffes along the way. Good for the Mets for being on the right side of history when he did. Maybe someday Frank Cashen gets in the Hall of Fame as well.