In his first year of eligibility, Joe DiMaggio got 44.3 percent of the votes to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Less than Rabbit Maranville. Less than Ted Lyons.
DiMaggio didn’t even make it into the Hall in his second year of eligibility (but Rabbit did!). It wasn’t until his third try that DiMaggio became a Hall of Famer.
Joe Flippin DiMaggio!
The 56-game hitting streak. A .325 lifetime hitter. Three-time MVP and nine-time World Series champion. By the time he was selected, he had already married Marilyn Monroe, a certain first-ballot Hall of Famer in her own right.
All of this is to point out that baseball people need to seriously settle down over the Ichiro-wasn’t-unanimous discussion that has come up this week after the 2025 voting was announced.
There is truly only one Hall of Fame that matters and of course it is baseball. The rest are just imitators and rather bad ones at that.
Football has some super-secretive committee that acts as though it is electing a Pope instead of deciding whether a Kansas City lineman from the 1960s is more worthy than a Miami defensive backs from the ‘90s.
As for basketball, who really knows? There are NBA stars, college players, foreign players and basically anybody else who has ever dribbled a basketball is eligible.
But the Baseball Hall of Fame is special. The location (Cooperstown, NY) is special, the building is special and it takes a special player to get enshrined. (Let’s leave Harold Baines out of this discussion for now.)
This week, three new members were voted into the Hall of Fame – Ichiro Suzuki, C.C. Sabathia and Billy Wagner.
Whether that is too few or too many to get elected isn’t – and shouldn’t be — the point. Part of the fun of it is comparing them to guys who aren’t in the Hall of Fame with comparable statistics (take a bow, Curt Schilling).
That’s always been the great allure of the Hall of Fame. Four hundred or so members of the Baseball Writers Association of America are the gatekeepers and a former player must be chosen by 75 percent of the electorate. BBWAA members can vote for anywhere from zero to 10 in a given year.
For decades, it has always been simple – you are either in or you’re not. Doesn’t really matter how many votes you get as long as it meets the 75 percent threshold.
But now, apparently that’s not the “unofficial” case anymore.
Though it has been building for some time, the new point of contention isn’t the 75 percent mark. Instead it’s whether or not some inductees (in this case, Ichiro) are unanimous in their first time appearing on the ballot.
It’s tough enough to get 394 people to agree that the sun rises in the East, much less on whether a candidate is Hall worthy.
Some are calling for the unnamed voter to (1) have the stones to identify him/herself (2) have voting privileges revoked or (3) be hung in the public square at sunset.
And it keeps getting worse.
Now the story comes out that Ichiro wants to invite that lone wolf to his house for a friendly get-together. “I would like to invite him over to my house, and we’ll have a drink together and have a good chat,” Ichiro said.
And discuss what? Japanese-American tariffs? Sushi recipes? Why the Chiefs seem to get all the calls in the NFL playoffs?
How did we get so hung up on this unanimity thing? If someone doesn’t want to vote for a candidate, that’s their right. No explanation needed.
When Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees finished one vote short in 2020, half of heads in Manhattan exploded. The year before, teammate Mariano Rivera became the first – and so far only – player to get selected unanimously and I could make the case that there are a couple of small warts on his candidacy as well.
But so what? Is Rivera’s statue any bigger than the rest because he was on every ballot? Once again, you are either in or you’re not.
Babe Ruth wasn’t unanimous. Willie Mays wasn’t. Hank Aaron wasn’t.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there Joltin’ Joe DMaggio is saying “hold my beer.”
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com