While we all enjoy the performative outrage of baseball medioids who found provocative insult and/or inexcusable stupidity in the one Hall of Fame vote that Ichiro Suzuki did not get when the results were released Tuesday, we have heard nothing about the unspecified number of voters for the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame who didn't cast a ballot for him when Ichiro was inducted there earlier this week. This leads us to assume if nothing else that Japanese fans don't have America’s unanimity fetish, let alone our propensity to be annoying scolds.
Suzuki was approved to headline the July dog-and-pony extravaganza in Cooperstown by 393 of the 394 participating voters, which meant of course that the hunt was on for the one recalcitrant Hall of Fame voter who either didn't watch baseball for 19 consecutive years, forgot who he was voting for because nobody uses Ichiro’s last name, or was too excited to check off Troy Tulowitzki's name to read the one after C.C. Sabathia. Whatever the reason, that was the main takeaway from Tuesday's announcement—that everyone got a chance to screech about the one person who had disgraced and perhaps ruined baseball forever by not voting for one of the most obviously deserving players of his era.
But here we have to pause our narrative to discuss the definition of the word "hunt." In this case, hunting isn't actually hunting as much as it is demanding that the miscreant reveal him or herself and then have his or her voting rights taken away under the principle that deviation from the agreed-upon norm must be punished through admission and humiliation. Presumably this is because there isn’t enough of that sort of thing going on already. And who wouldn't want some of that as part of their new year's experience?
In no other sport is the voting itself considered more important than those being voted upon. Not even football, which crows incessantly about its unitary hold on America's collective eyeball based on a system whose measurements demonstrate that eight of out every nine Americans don't actually watch the games, demands this kind of fealty. It doesn't care that people watch the game so long as they pay for it. Their definition of shame is mostly "are you eating that last wing?" But that’s a different sport.
Baseball is somehow different, because the one who votes no is always foremost on fans’ minds, and as much as people want the pretty paragraph of the unanimous inductee, they’ve also already read all that. We'd rather complain about the holdout, as we did in 2020 with Capital One's Derek Jeter, who also fell just one vote shy of unanimity. Or, anyway, people did that for about three days, and then we lost interest, as we always do on anything of such national import. That voter never did self-abase, and we still do not know who he or she was. Jeter's life has gone on, and in no circumstance has he ever been introduced as "Hall Of Famer Except To That One Insidious Bastard, Derek Jeter." Matters of such overarching principle have such a brief shelf life. It is exhausting, among other things, to do Joseph Stalin stuff in one’s leisure time.
Anyway, there is one person out there who believes Ichiro's five hitless at-bats with Seattle in 2019 ruined an otherwise exemplary career, and with all manner of concern for this person's essential powers of deduction, we defend the principle of their reflexive obstinacy even in the face of both compelling evidence to the contrary and the insistent hive mind. We never did learn the holdout's name in Jeter’s case because the only people who know have never outed the poor bastard, and said poor bastard never outed him or herself. That's the hole in the "oh, they just do it for attention" argument people used to apply to stuff like this. Doing something for attention in the internet age is the equivalent of inviting an arsonist to the company barbecue—the principle is sound, but the proportions are way off.
But we also love a mystery, which is why it is delicious to consider the possibility that the same holdout in the Jeter election did so with Ichiro as well—while fascinatingly not omitting Mariano Rivera from their ballot in his unanimous selection. The far greater likelihood is that these are two different people with two uniquely bizarre views of how baseball is to be valued. But until we find out otherwise, we're going with the lone voter theory.
There was a time, after all, when not letting anyone be a first-ballot Hall of Famer with a unanimous vote was a matter of pure, sour principle. Not Babe Ruth (11 votes), not Willie Mays (23 votes), not Jackie Robinson (36 votes), not Mickey Mantle (43 votes), not Bob Gibson (64 votes), not anyone got in with a full slate on the first ballot. Back then, by cracky, you made the Hall of Fame the old-fashioned way—by sitting on your couch waiting for a phone call that didn't come for years. Unanimity didn't become a serious issue for the voters until Ken Griffey The Younger—or, as Ichiro called him yesterday, by his given name George—missed by three votes in 2016, and even then we never found out who those three holdouts were despite an equally outraged response, as voters were and still are allowed not to publish their votes if they so deem.
Maybe the same person who didn't see Ichiro as worthy of a Cooperstown trip voted against Griffey out of some anti-Mariners bias that remains well-hidden in the rest of society, which tends not to notice the Mariners at all. Maybe that person also didn't vote for Jeter, but voted for Rivera the year before out of some misguided fear of detection. Except that Rivera got in the year before Jeter, not after. Look, there is a pattern here somewhere, damn it, and all you tedious scolds pretending to be reporters while demanding that the guilty party surrender peacefully, weep out a confession, forfeit their voting rights and be marched through the streets of Seattle like Qaddafi aren't doing the legwork required to right this wrong. Maybe that’s because it isn't that big a wrong, and more just one more thing to complain about to get through another long, wet off-season day. I mean, Ichiro looked pretty happy on TV yesterday.
Frankly, if there is one serial no voter out there, we'd prefer that they remain at large, if only because they are providing us with baseball's version of a police procedural, and you know how we love those. Let us parse through past votes—the BBWAA provides a yearly list of those who voted and agreed to make their ballots public two weeks after the announcement, when the heat has blown off—to check off the ones with alibis. Let us pore over loads of stories by voters telling us breathlessly whom they approved of as part of a "look at me" campaign disguised as transparency. Let us try to figure out the identities of all 394 voters. Let us deputize Hall of Fame geekazoid Ryan Thibodaux, who does all these things on his own, give him a staff and a budget to solve this conundrum once and for all.
Or, in the reasonable alternative, we could all just relax and count the 393 instead of the one. If the no voter did so out of an honest reservation, leave him or her be; they’ve clearly got bigger problems than this. And if the no voter did it because he doesn't like the idea of a Rookie of the Year who had 4,000 previous professional plate appearances, let him or her be cast into nerd hell. If the no voter just forgot, let’s get a GoFundMe going so the Hall can send him some Prevagen. We have already tampered with enough people's voting rights for one generation. How about we just let this one go, Matlock?
