No Unanimity? No Problem. The Hall Calls for Suzuki, Sabathia, and Wagner

As Derek Jeter goes, so goes Ichiro Suzuki. For the second time in the history of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, a candidate with an impeccable résumé has missed unanimous selection by a single vote from among nearly 400 ballots, leaving Mariano Rivera as the only player to run the table. Nonetheless — and far more importantly — Suzuki is Cooperstown-bound. In the voting results that were announced on Tuesday evening, Suzuki received 99.7% of the vote, and was joined by two other honorees, namely first-year candidate CC Sabathia (86.8%) and 10th-year candidate Billy Wagner (82.5%), the latter after missing election by just five votes last year.

Based upon the 216 ballots published in the Ballot Tracker prior to the announcement of the results, the only questions that carried real suspense were whether Suzuki would be unanimous and whether third-year candidate Carlos Beltrán would clear 75%. Beltran received 81.5% of the vote on published ballots, but finished with 70.3%, still a healthy 13.2-point jump from last year. Eighth-year candidate Andruw Jones, whose Tracker share hovered just below 75% for most of the cycle, finished with 66.2%. No other candidate received more than 40%, with second-year candidate Chase Utley (39.8%) the closest. Beltrán and Jones are well-positioned for election with next year’s slate, which lacks any candidate likely to be honored in his first year; Cole Hamels and Ryan Braun head that class.

This is the second year in a row that the writers have tabbed three candidates, after last year’s trio of Adrian Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer, and the seventh time in the past 12 cycles that the writers have elected more than two candidates. Over the 2014–25 span, the writers have elected 30 candidates, that despite one shutout (2021) and two cycles with just a single honoree (’22 and ’23).

What follows here are a few quick take-home points from the electoral results. I’ll have a candidate-by-candidate breakdown in my next installment.

Not Unanimous, But Close

In the first Hall of Fame election in 1936, Ty Cobb received the highest share of the vote (98.2%), but he was still left off four of the 226 ballots cast by the writers. Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner, who tied for the second-highest share (95.1%), were each left off seven ballots, while Christy Mathewson (90.7%) was absent from 21 and Walter Johnson (83.6%) from 37. The fact that not even these all-time greats could attain unanimity from those grizzled voters set a precedent that was upheld for over 80 years by self-appointed gatekeepers within the BBWAA. Not even Stan Musial, Willie Mays, or Henry Aaron could reach 100% despite their incredible resumés. Would you believe that 23 clowns left Mays off their ballots?

A funny thing happened along the way to the 2020s, however. With the vast majority of ballots published in the Tracker, either ahead of the announcement or afterwards, voters and other interested parties have come to expect transparency and accountability. At the direction of the Hall’s board of directors, and despite the wishes of the BBWAA itself — which has voted twice to publish every ballot, as is done with the annual awards — voters aren’t obligated to reveal their ballots, and so we don’t know exactly who omitted Mays, Aaron, Jeter, or Suzuki, or what their motives might have been. Prior to 2016, the only candidate since Cobb who came within five votes of election was Tom Seaver in 1992. In 2016, Ken Griffey Jr. was named on all of the ballots published prior to the announcement, and likewise for Rivera in ’19, Jeter in ’20, and Suzuki this year. All but Rivera wound up with at least one still-anonymous voter omitting them.

Since the 2020 electorate had two more voters than this year’s, Suzuki’s share of the vote ranks “only” third:

While it would have been nice if the individual who left Ichiro off their ballot hadn’t done so, ultimately voting share is just trivia for tables like the one above. The Hall doesn’t note a candidate’s voting percentage on his plaque, and those plaques aren’t hung any higher based on their share. Instead of letting that single vote spoil the fun, let’s celebrate the first election of a Japanese-born player to the Hall. With the Rookie of the Year and MVP combo, two batting titles, membership in the 3,000 hit club, and a run of 10 straight seasons in which he earned All-Star honors and won Gold Gloves after coming stateside at age 27, Suzuki was a lock for the Hall even before considering his status as one of the game’s great global ambassadors. Turnout in Cooperstown for his induction on July 27 is going to be a sight to behold.

The Start of Something?

Given his 251 career victories, 3,093 strikeouts (the third-highest mark for a left-hander), six All-Star appearances, a Cy Young and a World Series ring, Sabathia already possessed credentials that far surpass those of many Hall of Famers, not to mention a compelling narrative arc that included his remaking himself as a finesse pitcher after his fastball had faded, and his very public battle with alcoholism. Heading into this cycle, his election on the first ballot was hardly a certainty. Yet his support was quite robust from the outset, remaining at or above 90% in the Tracker for all but one brief interval. Like most candidates, Sabathia’s support wasn’t quite as strong on the unpublished ballots (79.8% by my back-of-the-envelope math), but he nonetheless became the first starter elected by the writers since Roy Halladay in 2019.

That six-year interval feels like a long time, particularly given the evolution of starting pitcher trends, especially since the pandemic, but it’s actually half as long as the gap between the writers’ elections of Ryan (1999) and Bert Blyleven (2011), the latter of whom was the first starter with fewer than 300 wins to be elected since Fergie Jenkins (1991). Voters have grappled with shifting standards before, and while the upcoming quartet of Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, and Justin Verlander will breeze into Cooperstown once they become eligible (Greinke perhaps as soon as 2029 since he didn’t pitch last season), it’s an open question as to which starters will follow in their wake.

One look at the BBWAA’s track record when it comes to electing starters shows that this kind of ebb and flow is nothing new. Here are two decade-by-decade breakdowns that look quite different depending upon where one draws the dividing line, but in both cases, the most recent stretch isn’t unprecedented:

For all of that, the general consensus is that the BBWAA’s standards for starers have become too high because certain common milestones — not just 300 wins, but even 250 or 200 — are increasingly inaccessible given 21st-century usage constraints. Sabathia, who was born in 1980 yet threw more innings (3,577.1) than any pitcher born after 1966, didn’t suffer so much due to those constraints, but with the possible exception of Verlander, who’s currently 161.2 innings shy of Sabathia’s total, we just aren’t going to see anyone shoulder that kind of workload again.

As for the other starters on the ballot, Félix Hernández debuted with 20.6%, more than enough to keep him around for an extended discussion of standards, and Andy Pettitte more than doubled his support relative to last year, from 13.5% to 27.9%. Mark Buehrle gained about three points, to 11.4%. There’s more to come on this topic, I promise.

A Final Save for Billy Wags

In gaining entry on his 10th ballot, Wagner — the most dominant reliever ever in terms of strikeout rate and opponent batting average among pitchers with at least 900 innings, and the best reliever outside the Hall by R-JAWS — completed quite a comeback. In part because the 2016 ballot was overcrowded and because he debuted alongside the pitcher who had previously held the all-time saves record (Trevor Hoffman), Wagner’s candidacy started slowly. With his election, he now owns the second-lowest first-year voting percentage of any modern (post-1966) candidate elected by the writers:

If you’ve followed my work for the past two-plus decades, you’ll note that all but Snider are candidates whose causes were aided by advanced statistics such as ERA+, WAR, and JAWS. Thanks to an evolving electorate that’s been both increasingly receptive to the use of such metrics and increasingly transparent about whom it supports, we’ve seen these candidates overcome their slow starts and get to 75% with a frequency that was once unimaginable.

Again, it’s worth noting that low first-year percentages don’t happen in a vacuum, and they aren’t always a direct judgment regarding the candidates themselves but rather the product of the stiff competition for space given the 10-candidate voting limit. Here’s a graph showing the annual counts of how many candidates cleared the JAWS standards at their positions, and how many reached 50 JAWS (40 for catchers):

Wagner debuted on the 2016 ballot alongside 11 players who meet the JAWS standards and 14 with at least 50 JAWS (40 for catchers). Even with some voters excluding PED-linked candidates, that’s a lot of traffic to overcome.

Meanwhile, Wagner also joined the growing list of candidates elected in their final year of BBWAA eligibility. Four of the eight have happened in the past decade:

Unlike Wagner, the three previous 10th-year selections from the past decade hit the ballot when candidates still had 15 years of eligibility, but the Hall unilaterally changed that rule in 2014, and it didn’t grandfather any of them in. Rice, meanwhile, had the full run of 15 years of annual balloting. The three honorees before him had candidacies that dated back to the brief period when the writers were voting biennially, when eligibility windows were even longer, and when run-off elections were conducted if no candidate reached 75%. In fact, Medwick and Ruffing tied for the top spot with 72.6% in 1967, but in the second round of balloting featuring the top 30 candidates (31 actually, due to a tie), Ruffing outpolled Medwick, 86.9% to 81%, and got the lone spot. Medwick was the only candidate elected by the writers the following year.

Thanks for No Blanks

A total of 394 ballots were cast during this cycle, nine more than last year — which had the lowest total of ballots since 1983 — and 187 fewer than in 2011, when a record 581 ballots were cast. Tough times in media have shrunk the electorate, with the Hall of Fame’s 2015 decision to sunset honorary voters once they’re 10 years removed from active coverage playing a part as well. It’s all a reminder that it’s a privilege to participate in the process, one that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and for however off base you may think a given voter’s ballot is, their presence within the electorate is hard-earned.

This year’s 6.77 votes per ballot and 24.9% of voters using all 10 slots were both well within the range of what we’ve seen over the past half-dozen cycles:

For the second year in a row, not a single voter returned a blank ballot, according to the BBWAA. Note that there are couple years above where the organization didn’t report whether any blanks were received, notably the ones where Griffey and Jeter just missed unanimity. Blanks do count in the denominator of the vote total and thus require three “yes” votes apiece to offset.

Everybody Gains… Except Torii

As was the case in my year-to-year comparisons of our crowdsourced balloting, every returning candidate except Torii Hunter received a higher share from the voters in 2025 than in ’24. Hunter fell by 2.2 points, and was one ballot away from slipping below 5%. Ten candidates did receive less than 5% and are ineligible for further consideration by the BBWAA, including two I voted for on the basis of their elite pitch framing metrics, Russell Martin and Brian McCann (ouch). Only three candidates were shut out, though one of them, Ben Zobrist, not only led his league in WAR once but also changed the way rosters were constructed. At the other end of the spectrum, three candidates posted double-digit gains, namely Pettitte, Beltrán, and Utley. With the exception of Wagner, all of the other gains amounted to less than five points:

I’ll have a look at every candidate’s performance in my next installment.

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