profile

Hall of Fame 2025: Ichiro, Sabathia, and Wagner Inducted, Plus a Full Ballot Breakdown

Published 9 months ago • 1 min read

For the second year in a row, the Baseball Writers sent a three-person group to Cooperstown. Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia made it in their first election, while longtime Astro closer Billy Wagner made it on his tenth and final try. Those three, along with Veterans Committee picks Dave Parker and Dick Allen, will serve as Baseball’s Hall of Fame Class of 2025.
​
It’s a pretty well-rounded bunch, spearheaded by the first Japanese player in Cooperstown history. Ichiro, in his first ever ballot, fell just one vote shy of unanimity (393/394), tying him with Derek Jeter for the second-best performance in BBWAA ballot history. The right fielder finished with 3089 hits over nineteen seasons with the Mariners, Yankees, and Marlins, thanks in part to nine straight 200-hit campaigns to start his MLB career.
​
That total is made all the more impressive by the fact that his debut season in the US came at the age of 27, making him one of the latest-debuting Hall of Famers in history; if you count his nine seasons in Japan before that, he has a staggering 4367 professional hits in his career, which started at the age of 18 and lasted until he was 45 (stats from Baseball-Reference unless otherwise stated, by the way).
​
It's hard to argue against Suzuki’s case, which includes both the 2001 AL MVP and Rookie of the Year Award, plus a pair of batting titles, three Silver Sluggers, and a full ten All-Star Selections and Gold Gloves. The Mariners have already announced that they’ll be retiring his number #51 (no word yet on whether his predecessor for the number, Randy Johnson, can expect a similar honor later).
​
There was an outside chance that he would hit 100%, as he was still perfect through all 216 Early ballots in Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker, but alas, that was not the case. We’ll see in the coming days if the one No vote steps forward (and the tracker will continue to update as more voters reveal their ballots), but it’s worth keeping in mind that we still don’t know who the one vote against Derek Jeter was back in 2020, so we may just never learn.
​
​Read more »​

Read more from

I don’t know that I have much specific to say about this year’s entry in my annual Playoff Trivia Series. Especially not after last year’s version, where I had to fit writing the entire thing in after that last-day double header. This is so much nicer of an experience (especially coming right on the heels of the huge Playlist article that I just published over at Out of Left Field).Anyway, as a refresher, for those of you looking for a team to bandwagon for this postseason, perhaps this...

19 days ago • 2 min read

I usually try and get my Summer Playlist article out for Labor Day weekend, since that’s the traditional “End of Summer”, but I was busy around then this year, so it couldn’t be done. I thought about waiting until next Monday to post this too since I’ve become really attached to the “Music Monday” column name that I use, but this already feels overdue as is, plus my schedule is getting crowded with the end of the baseball season (and my usual articles that come with it). So here we finally...

23 days ago • 2 min read

I’ve wanted to revisit some ideas about big rebuilds and what comes next, so I started looking into it around the All-Star Break. However, the process sort of spiraled into something bigger, and as it went on, I realized that the first half of the article was a little more timely than the back-half. So rather than finish the whole thing and then start making decisions on publishing and where to divide it, I made the call to just preemptively split it up and publish the first part before it...

3 months ago • 2 min read