Ladies and gentlemen, your 2025 Baseball HoF inductees.
Ichiro (so damn good he doesn’t need his last name, you know who he is if you follow baseball)
C.C. Sabathia
Billy Wagner
There are few players who deserved to be unanimously voted in. Ichiro is one of those few. He missed a unanimous vote by one vote. Who ever that writer was should have his ballot taken away.
Baseball HoF ballots are now made public, the voter who left Ichiro off, also did not put his or her name on the ballot so we don’t know who it was. If I were King for the day, I’d simply toss any unsigned ballots. Done and done, Ichiro is unanimous.
Probably the same person won’t vote for Pujoles either.
I really have struggled over the years about how someone, supposedly tied and close to baseball can’t vote for the likes of Griffey, Chipper Jones, R. Johnson, Jeter, Maddux, Ryan. All those names in my baseball watching lifetime should have been 100% confirmed. Crazy that people can’t see that or choose to stick their nose up to someone.
HOF is watered down. Billy Wagner had 18% of the votes needed in his first year of eligibility and after 9 more votes all of a sudden he’s a Hall of Famer?
I was also surprised by Wagner getting in. I do think the game has changed enough over the last 20 years that pitchers probably have a different thought process going forward. I don’t think a reliever like Wagner should be getting in when someone like John Franco was never consider because he didn’t exclusively save games and the Reds traded him before he could win a World Series.
I was reading about this last night and one comment was, perhaps that writer didn’t vote for Ichiro because he knew he was a shoe-in and wanted to try and get someone else in. I think that would be a weak excuse, but it’s the only one that even makes a little sense to me.
In those days, there was some weird opposition by some voters to letting you in on the first year of eligibility. Musial and Williams got only 93% of the ballots. Mantle got 88%. DiMaggio was not even voted in on his first year of eligibility (you need 75%).
The Baseball Writers are among the most sanctimonious holier than thou gatekeeping douchebags in the sports world. They think they’ve got some ordained sacred duty to protect whatever they believe are the God-given principles of baseball (lights shine down from the heavens and angels sing…)
I never understood the thought process behind “he’s a hall-of-famer, but he’s not a first-ballot hall of famer.” It seems to be far less common among the voters now, at least.
I only followed Billy Wagner when he was on the Phillies. Didn’t strike me at the time that I was looking at a hall-of-famer, but again, I don’t know the rest of his career. I do think it’s cool that he pitched left-handed, despite being right-handed. That doesn’t make him HoF, it’s just cool.