The singular BBWAA voter who snubbed Ichiro Suzuki for the Hall of Fame is still at large, and is likely to remain so after the organization’s final release of ballots.
Each Hall of Fame ballot comes with an option for the writer’s votes to be publicly released after the results are announced, though many writers announce their’s in advance. The final list arrived Tuesday, with 323 of the 394 votes (82%) available to the public. All 323 of them votes for Suzuki.
That means the voter who cost Suzuki the status of being the second player in MLB history to be unanimously elected to the Hall of Fame, after Mariano Rivera, was one of the 71 voters who opted to remain anonymous.
The situation follows the precedent of Derek Jeter, who also missed out on unanimity by one ballot, whose voter remains unknown five years later.
The situation is against the will of the BBWAA, which has voted in the past to make all votes public. It’s actually the Hall of Fame which has rejected the organization’s requests to do so.
Suzuki himself has spoken respectfully of his lone holdout, inviting him to his own home for a drink and a discussion:
“I’ve been coming to the Hall of Fame as a player seven times, and this is my eighth time here in the Hall of Fame, and what an honor it is for me to be here as a Hall of Famer. This is a very special moment. I was able to receive many votes from the writers, and [I’m] grateful for them, but there’s one writer that I wasn’t able to get a vote from. I would like to invite him over to my house, and we’ll have a drink together, and we’ll have a good chat.”
Suzuki made Cooperstown’s Class of 2025 on his first year of eligibility. He will be joined by fellow first-balloter CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner, who got in on his 10th and final year of eligibility. Dave Parker and Dick Allen also made the class through the Classic Baseball Committee vote, though Allen’s enshrinement will be posthumous.
Why someone wouldn’t vote for Ichiro Suzuki in the Hall of Fame
Even though only one player has ever been unanimously voted to the Hall of Fame, it’s a measure of the respect Suzuki cultivated in his lengthy career that news of his single snub was met with widespread outrage.
Most of the speculation about the vote is simply the reason why. It used to be that no player was ever expected to be unanimous, simply because it was accepted that some voters refused to vote for players on their first ballot because no other player — not Babe Ruth, not Willie Mays, not Rickey Henderson — has ever been unanimous. Rivera’s election showed that was no longer true.
That leaves behind a few remaining possibilities for why Suzuki didn’t get someone’s vote:
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Legitimately believing Suzuki isn’t a Hall of Famer: It would be a hard argument to make, but maybe there really is someone who doesn’t think a .311 batting average, 3,000 hits, 10 All-Star nods, 10 Gold Gloves, an MVP and a decorated career in Japan doesn’t warranted a spot in Cooperstown. The smallest of small-Hall voters.
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Playing the “he doesn’t need my vote” game: Because the BBWAA and Hall of Fame limit voters to only checking off a maximum of 10 players on their ballot, it is conceivable that someone looked at Suzuki and thought they could vote for 10 other players they believe to be deserving while leaving off a player who was clearly entering the Hall no matter how they voted.
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A legitimate mistake: A theory advanced by MLB.com’s Mike Petriello last week. Humans are fallible and it’s entirely possible someone thought they had checked off Suzuki and didn’t. That exact scenario actually happened when players were asked to fill out their own ballot, as one player left off Suzuki and didn’t realize he had done so until he was asked.
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Wanting to watch the world burn, or whatever: Maybe someone out there just really, really doesn’t like Suzuki, or wants to make a weird point about … something? We could speculate for days, but let’s just say that personal reasons could be at play as well.
We’ll probably never know who didn’t vote for Suzuki, and therefore we’ll probably never know the reason why. It doesn’t really matter in the long run, but no one likes an unsolved case going cold.
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