Hall of Fame Wrap-Up

Ichiro, CC and Wagner are in. Who's on deck?

Our Hall of Fame wrap-up for 2025 is here… if you feel like watching, here’s the hour-long YouTube Live instant reaction video I did immediately after the Hall announcements. It’s exactly as professional as you would expect it to be! This is going to be some YouTube Channel… you’ll definitely want to subscribe, right?

Let’s go through the latest Hall of Fame news:

Ichiro Elected (Obviously) but Not Unanimously

OK, so there were 394 BBWAA voters this year… and 393 of us voted for Ichiro Suzuki. One person did not. I do not expect that one person to come forward—the one person who didn’t vote for Derek Jeter never did—and in the end, the non-vote doesn’t matter, the reason doesn’t matter, the whole thing is pointless trivia.

But I will say again: I simply do not get what anyone would get out of being a Baseball Hall of Fame voter if it means not voting for Ichiro Suzuki, maybe the coolest ballplayer of all time. Maybe there’s some Mariano Rivera superfan out there* who has made it a life mission to make sure that nobody else ever gets voted in unanimously. Maybe there’s some sort of obtuse joy in forever looking at Ichiro’s 99.7% vote percentage and knowing that you’re the one who cost him that .003.

*This doesn’t feel like the best time to be a Mariano Rivera superfan.

There used to be a time when a handful of voters honestly seemed to believe that nobody should be elected unanimously. I didn’t exactly agree with their reasoning, and still don’t… but I do think I understand it: That argument is that there is no perfect ballplayer, and that if Babe Ruth wasn’t elected unanimously, if Stan Musial wasn’t elected unanimously, if Ted Williams and Jackie Robinson and Bob Feller and Willie Mays and Henry Aaron weren’t elected unanimously, well, nobody ever should be.

I think that sort of thing is misguided—why double down on mistakes of the past?—but I also think there is at least a dignity to that logic, a nod to the fallibility of baseball. Willie Mays made 136 errors. Babe Ruth never won the Triple Crown. Ted Williams struck out 709 times. Perfection cannot be achieved in baseball.

And so, I kind of thought of those “nobody gets into the Hall unanimously” people like the Grail Knight in “Indiana Jones” who dedicated his long life to protecting the Holy Grail. I wouldn’t want the job, but I kind of understand why they took it on.

Slowly, the Unanimity Knights aged out, leaving behind a younger and leaner and much more open Hall of Fame voting class. The BBWAA, whatever complaints people might have, is the most open voting bloc in professional sports, maybe in American life. The voters for other Halls of Fame, across the board, reveal nothing. But the BBWAA gives out vote totals. The vast majority of us not only tell you exactly who we voted for but offer detailed reasons why.