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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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