Who didn’t vote for Ichiro Suzuki on Baseball Hall of Fame ballot? Lone holdout could remain anonymous

The most important thing that happened on Tuesday insofar as the Baseball Hall of Fame is concerned is that three players – Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner – were announced as having been elected to Cooperstown by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA). They’ll be inducted this summer alongside Dave Parker and the late Dick Allen, who were chosen by the most recent Era Committee to receive the same honor. 

Opinions on the second-most important thing will vary but some will land on the fact that Ichiro was not elected unanimously. Ichiro was elected easily, yes, by being named on 99.7% of ballots. However – bulletin forthcoming – 99.7% is not 100%, and thus Ichiro was not a unanimous choice. Framed another way, 393 BBWAA voters cast a ballot for Ichiro, but one turned in a ballot without his name on it. 

In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter. Ichiro will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer just like so many other legends of the sport. That he wasn’t unanimous when everyone else with a vote and an opinion saw him as an obvious Hall of Famer raises a common yet ultimately fruitless question: Who could do such a thing?

We don’t know and we very likely won’t know, which, given human tendencies, is probably a good thing. Many BBWAA voters choose to make their ballots public, as our very own Matt Snyder and Mike Axisa did for this year’s Hall of Fame vote. Public disclosure of a ballot, however, is not a requirement. Here’s how the BBWAA official site explains the policy: 

“In December 2016, members of the BBWAA present at the annual meeting at the Winter Meetings voted 80-9 in favor of making it mandatory that all Hall of Fame ballots be made public. The Board of Directors of the Hall of Fame rejected the BBWAA’s proposal. Since then, the Hall has given voters the option to choose whether to have his or her ballot released on this web site, following the election. In 2022, 78.4 percent of voters chose to reveal their ballots.”

Maybe that voter will step forward and offer an explanation for the decision to leave Ichiro off the ballot, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen. You’ll recall that no less a player than Derek Jeter in recent years missed being a unanimous Hall selection by one vote, just like Ichiro, and roughly five years later we still don’t know who omitted the Yankees legend from the ballot. 

As for the potential reasons our unnamed voter thought better of Ichiro, it’s of course impossible to say. Perhaps it was innocent oversight. Perhaps the voter took the lazy way out, eyeballed Ichiro’s great-but-not-inner-circle WAR total, ignored, oh, everything else about his case, and decided he wasn’t deserving, at least of first-ballot status. Maybe it was a numbers game. Voters are not permitted to vote for more than 10 candidates in a given year and, depending on your criteria, it’s often possible to find more than 10 worthies. Perhaps the voter rightly assumed Ichiro would cruise in and spent those 10 spots on less certain hopefuls. 

At this point, it’s worth recalling that only one player, legendary closer Mariano Rivera, has ever been unanimously elected to the Hall. That’s right, think of any other baseball luminary – Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Rickey Henderson – and none of them were named on every ballot. That’s patently absurd, but it’s the truth. It became a self-perpetuating bit of nonsense, as the occasional voter would say something like, “If [legendary player X] wasn’t a unanimous choice, then [slightly inferior legendary player Y] sure can’t be, either.”

Whatever the reasons and whoever the voter, it doesn’t ultimately matter. Ichiro is a Hall of Famer, as he plainly should be, and we humans as ever can rarely agree on anything in unanimity.