THE response to a lone voice in the wilderness reveals much about the tragedy inherent in human behavior.
Whistleblowers are shunned. Dissenters are shamed. Cassandras are ignored, pigeonholed.
Or, as Jeremiah the bullfrog once said: "Prophets are not without dishonor, save in their own country."
As we contend with the forces of fascism in this nation, we hear false calls for unity on all sides. As it is in politics, so it is elsewhere--even in what Bill James so bitterly termed "the politics of glory."
THUS the reaction to that lone dissenter in the Hall of Fame voting results shows the latent fascism that is cresting everywhere, including in the carefully monitored world of baseball media, where a not-so-whispered call for unanimity was once again squelched. The anger manifested by the formerly reasonable Jayson Stark, the tight-lipped condescension (masked, as always, by a pretense of "understanding") from Joe (the Poser) Posnanski makes it clear that something more sinister is at the root of such exasperated contempt.
The vested interest in unanimity has become a hallmark of our increasingly fractured age, where tiny political majorities push opposing agendas with the fury and momentum of a unilateral mandate. This unyielding reality of thrust and parry has created both a fervor and an profound sense of exhaustion in everything--where all are trapped in a maelstrom of backlash. From this perfervid psychological state, they seek not to "agree to disagree," but to belittle or crush the opposition....to create unanimous fealty to something--anything (often something that just doesn't make sense).
ENTER
Ichiro Suzuki, or: how erstwhile liberals can turn into hegemonic hagiographers and foment their own form of fascism.
Ichiro was a terrific respite from the more overwrought offensive explosion that shattered some sacrosanct baseball records in the late 90s. His single-minded singles hitting was a refreshing change of pace from all that--and when the steroids scandal hit (during the backlash from a semi-liberal Clinton administration), it was Ichiro who gave us an unexpected new record that flipped the script as we watched the bloated "shock and awe" of the Iraq war turn into so much mush.
After riding the wave of the Seattle Mariners' 116-win 2001 to MVP and Rookie of the Year awards, Ichiro crashed through with 262 hits in 2004, allowing folks to conveniently ignore the fact that the M's won just a bit more than half as many games that year (63) as they did in 2001. From that point on, Ichiro was the M's only reliable story, and he pounded out 200 hits a season at a relentless clip, making it ten in a row in 2010 (a year in which Seattle won just 61 games).
But by then Suzuki had amassed a truly beautiful number of hits (2244) and it was clear that his particular phenomenon--so absent everywhere else in baseball--was highly eligible for coddling in order to cement his chances for Cooperstown. His lifetime BA in MLB was still a sprightly .331, a lone echo of a decaying vestige of such numbers created by more varied bat wizards such as Rod Carew, Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn--all of whom had found their way into the Hall of Fame via the front-door guarantee of 3000 hits.
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| Ichiro and that 100% man... |
AND so the race was on...soon to become more akin to a festering death watch. He was still spunky at 38, he still had most of his speed, but age was unraveling his springy singles swing. 2011 brought an end to his 200-hit skein; things got hinky enough in Seattle the next year that the M's management realized they couldn't subsidize his drive for 3000 hits any more: they shipped him to the Yankees, where he could be a media toy.
He hit .322 down the stretch in 2012, which prompted the Yankees to re-sign him, but disaster ensued as the Bombers choked themselves with ancient superstars for two cataclysmically creaky seasons, barely scraping over .500 in both 2013 and 2014. They decided that keeping Ichiro around in order to milk his 3000th hit was going to kill the cow; thus Suzuki was sent to where so many aging New Yorkers had always gone--Miami.
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| Is there anything this man can't do? |
The Fish knew it was going to take two years to get Ichiro over the hump, but 2015 was a nightmare: Suzuki hit just .229, looking especially helpless in September (10-for-72, ,139). They swallowed hard, but kept the faith--and Ichiro responded with a carefully curated comeback season in 2016, riding a hot start to a .291 batting average--including a month-long stretch in May & June where he rekindled a vivid facsimile of his previous panache (32-for-83, .386). He recorded his 3000th hit on August 7th (sadly, in Coors Field, not in Miami).
There would be another 89 hits, all semi-superfluous--in 2017 he and the Fish would partner to give him another record to go with his single-season hits mark: Miami sent Suzuki up as a pinch-hitter 109 times, shattering the old single-season record held by Rusty Staub. The next year, serendipity in the form of injuries gave Ichiro a chance to briefly reconcile with the Mariners, and in 2019 MLB's internationalist impetus gave him a chance to return to Japan with the M's and take his final bow (the PR was better than the result: Suzuki went 0-for-5 in his swan song).
WHAT's clear about Ichiro is that as good as he was, he became an even bigger media star throughout this process. Getting to 3000 hits clearly ensured his enshrinement (only three of the 33 players to do so have so far evaded Cooperstown; one of those--Miguel Cabrera--will join the other thirty in 2030).
But it's that unanimity thing that we were decrying above. And now a chart of those thirty-three 3000-hit guys is needed, to help us as we navigate a thicket of motives (and a nest of vipers).
As you can see, it's the same list twice--first sorted by the neo-sabe all-purpose dandruff shampoo: Wins Above Replacement. (Note, though, we use only the offensive portion of the method here, for two reasons: 1) we have innate & complete distrust of the defensive portion of this stat; 2) we are only discussing hitting here).
The first time (left side)we show the counting stat version--oWAR summed up and sorted in descending order. Do kindly note who is at the bottom of that chart.
The second time (right side) we show it as it should be seen--as a rate stat (oW/g means "oWAR per 162 games"). It's a more revealing measure, but putting them side-by-side produces its own revelations.
NOTE who is at the bottom of the list in both instances...
That's right. Those same folk who are so incensed at the lack of unanimity for Ichiro are generally skeptical about Lou Brock's bonafides to be in the Hall of Fame whatsoever.
(Of course--to steal a phrase from Nate Silver--there is more to Ichiro than this. But it's the hits thing--that shiny round number--which has sealed the deal and poured gasoline on a long-smoldering urge for unanimity. We'll explore some of the "more" further below.
All that said, it's clear that something amiss is afoot in the little world of baseball media. It began with overmoralizing and the boycott of steroids users for Hall of Fame induction, a stance which has festered in many ways and become egregiously tiresome. (So much so that we can read Joe the Poser whining about having to watch Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez become the latest victims of this ongoing pox against reason. Don't kvetch, Pose-man-ski--call it out for the sham that it is. But that will never be the approach taken by someone so expert at talking out of both sides of his mouth...)
Even Silver--that puckish pundit who was teleported into politics by a stroke of good fortune and now purportedly funneled and funded by the likes of those working hard to destroy what's left of democracy-- decided to weigh in on the Ichiro/Hall of Fame matter. (He was careful not to tip his hand regarding unanimity, however--he's learned over the year that speaking with a forked tongue pays better). What he
did do is create a silly pseudo-system for measuring "greatness" that is one part math, one part
Antonin Scalia, one part Chat GPT, and one set of spare parts cribbed together from the "C" and "D" positions in a "Four Square" court.
His comment on Ichiro was mostly limited to "of course"--but he worked hard at distorting his system to comically maximize Suzuki's score, hedging his bets further by suggesting that we should include his Japanese League stats in our assessment. (The one good thing in Nate's noodlings was some actual pushback on the steroids ban, where he rightly suggested that such things should not be unilateral, and expressing mild dismay that his fellow neo-sabe media mavens were perpetuating it.)
Suzuki's "international record" of 4367 hits has been bandied about as another argument for unanimity. Ironically, Silver's attempt to transcend WAR in his analysis foundered here, as he tried to parse Ichiro's early years using that measure without verifying how he was adjusting the stats to do so.
SO that's what we'll do right now (and then take things in an unexpected direction). Ichiro's best case for "unanimity" comes from combining those Japanese League stats with his peak years in MLB (2001-10). Can that pass muster?
To do that, we must adjust his years in Japan so that they reflect as realistically as possible what adjustments he made when playing in America. We'll cut to the chase with the numbers and explain on the other side of the chart:
At the top we have his 2001-10 stats, then his actual numbers in Japan. The third line sums these as if these were achieved in MLB--the "idealized" portrait of Ichiro's career. (We'll let those adepts in the semi-arcane art of "similarity scores" find the players who most resemble that fictional statistical line--but we'll clue you in that such a match will be hard to find: Suzuki's elevated HR total in Japan makes this idealized version a bonafide anomaly.)
Via some formula tinkering, we halved Ichiro's JL homer total to reflect how he approached hitting in MLB. We added triples, reduced doubles, and pushed his slash lines down a bit more than 10%. The adjustment gives him a slightly lower BA but a bit more power (possibly befitting what would've been the case in the higher offense 1990s).
The best fit for the adjusted numbers in terms of a similar performer is actually an amalgam:
Rod Carew for batting average,
Lou Brock for the shape and quantity of extra base hits. This "idealized Ichiro" will gain some in oWAR and oW/162, moving in the direction of Carew and leaving Brock behind. (But that doesn't boost him into anything remotely resembling unanimity: the region between Carew and Brock in HOF voting history ranges from 80%-Brock--to 91%--Carew. Both went in on the first ballot.)
And then there are those later years, when Suzuki pushed toward "3,000 American." In a different time, in one less fraught with division, strife, and pent-up grievance needing some semi-adolescent form of relief, those last years would have likely taken most of the wind of the "unanimity sailboat." (Pose-man-ski addresses the inverse of this notion in his both-side-windering, misleadingly "objective" assessment of what he should have called the "anti-unanimity knights," who--rightly--hold that due to the long-term flaws of the Hall of Fame election system, some checks and balances should apply even to slam-dunk candidates.)
But this breed of BBWAA voter needs something else. They not only need to believe that they are so much smarter than those who came before them--smarter than so many of the old guard pilloried by them when they were the brash outsiders--that they (just as the "analytics" folks who followed in their wake) have pushed much too hard in the other direction, creating the "groupthink" that is astonishing and troubling to someone like Stark (even as he finds himself embracing it).
How do these now-established voters proceed? They know that they are, at least in some ways, culpable for the transmogrification of baseball into the distended shape that it now encompasses, and while they can't bring themselves to jettison their ardent (and often unholy) love for "The Three True Outcomes," they know that the game has become significantly diminished by its increasingly two-dimensional uniformity.
So, as a form of semi-pathetic expiation, and in parallel with a nation buffeted by division and craving something (anything) resembling unanimity--they seized upon Ichiro as a symbolic token of such. Even better with respect to their (not-so) latent guilt about their role in turning the game into a home-run derby version of 1968, Ichiro is a throwback to the anti-sabermetric approach to baseball that they've discovered that they miss but don't have a clue as how to resurrect.
Thus they look for their expiation by bandwagoning him into a unanimous vote. The seed was planted when the membership actually achieved such a vote with
Mariano Rivera--undeniably the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history.
Hence the need to prop up Ichiro's case sabermetrically, as has been done in various ways ahead of the just-completed vote. The mild negatives we've covered above about Suzuki's MLB career simply did not appear in print during the run-up to the 2025 election...
This is more than groupthink (the euphemism employed by Stark and Joe the P). This is the nudge-nudge/wink-wink dynamic of a cadre of folks who banded together and, ironically enough, in some very strange (but predictable) ways, have turned into the people that they hated so many years ago.
As also seems to be the case in much larger, darker matters, within entire segments of America.
If this is not exactly fascism, it's an embryonic form of it, built from anger, exhaustion, grievance and lingering guilt. And it's manifesting here, as elsewhere, from folks who now have skin in the game and want to control the vertical and the horizontal (and probably the diagonal as well). Being eighty to ninety-one percent right is no longer satisfying to them: they crave unanimity. (The call-outs regarding the lone Ichiro holdout that have surfaced in the wake of the voting results have gone beyond annoyance and contempt; they've become much more combative.)
NOW for something of an unexpected direction. In modern baseball (let's call it since the flurry of expansion in the early and late 1960s) there have never been enough high-BA players. They were on the wane before BA was "exposed" as a wrong-headed approach to the game. With the exception of the offensive explosion, which raised the overall average of offense vis-a-vis isolated power much more than it did batting average, such hitters have been exceptionally scarce. Even fewer have done it year in and year out: they can counted literally on one hand--Carew, Boggs, Gwynn. (
Luis Arraez is a pale throwback to those guys; Ichiro fits in somewhere in between that due to a greater variability in maintaining a high BA and his late start in MLB.)
Opinions differ as to whether Ichiro went for 3000 for his legacy or because he'd studied the history of the game and concluded that his own personal "politics of glory" demanded it. His degraded performance level over his last years is something that would have been mercilessly harped upon in other, lesser players. His style of hitting may have prevented a good bit of this, however--and once he retired, there was a greater level of nostalgia for it due to the "launch angle" explosion.
It should be noted, though, that some such players manage to defy the odds of aging. Take a look at the difference in late-career performance between Suzuki and Gwynn:
Gwynn's data is highlighted in yellow. Note the similar slash lines for the early-mid parts of each career; Ichiro actually has more HR power than Tony. (But note also that Tony still has a somewhat higher OPS+ value in this comparison.)
But things change dramatically when the eras shift. One might initially conclude that the uptick in offense (and maybe a juiced ball, eh?) just carried Gwynn along to better numbers, but look again. Look at those OPS+ values for the late-career data: Tony gains ground relative to the league, while Ichiro pretty much collapses.
It's possible that Gwynn's strong finish helped to elevate his vote total when he arrived on the HOF ballot in 2007--he received 98% of the vote. With data like this, it's a real stretch to conclude that Ichiro is a better candidate--but that's what the current BBWAA cabal has done. No one railed about the injustice of Gwynn not being inducted unanimously back then. (Nor did anyone get tweaked about Cal Ripken, who came even closer than Tony--99%--in the same year.)
Ichiro almost certainly doesn't care at all about his vote percentage. Even the people grousing about it say it doesn't matter (even though they are grousing about it). What they need to do is take their thumb off the scale, to dial back the groupthink and put this into perspective. But this episode (and their increasingly urgent push for Andruw Jones--we'll spare you a recap of that...) shows that they are simply incapable of doing so.
Steve Buckley at The Athletic does a clever feint around the "reveal yourself" demands that have been surfacing. He reminds us that there should be room for more "informal" votes, less freighted by the need for an ascendant faction of the voter population to flex its muscles. There are tribute votes for players who have no realistic chance to be inducted. There are various attempts--some valid, some misguided (paging Jay Jaffe...)--to "influence" vote for players who would fall off the ballot. (In Jaffe's case, there are mixed motives: he was pushing Phangraf's "pitch framing" and making a dubious attempt to "innovate." His ploy failed.)
Buckley had it right--the tribute vote is something that transcends all of this scurrilous skullduggery, arm-twisting, bandwagoning, nocturnal-emission proselytizing. It seems to be an endangered species in this little world's embrace of "designer fascism." The man who would be folksier-than-thou, Joe the P, who loves to digress into such tribute territory at the drop of a hat (or the sacrifice of a pawn on his chessboard...), whiffed in a major-league way in 2025...after waxing folksy-eloquent about a popular favorite in sabe-ish circles, playing (of course) the hometown chauvinist card--the man in question was part of the Royals' slightly improbable World Series win in 2015--and reminding us that the same fella in the very next year then helped a team win its first Fall Classic in more than a century.
This player also pioneered the "post-postmodern" appearance of the "star utility" player, bursting onto the scene with a fabulous, MVP-adjacent season in 2009. He had a heck of a career over thirteen seasons: he even compiled a quite respectable WAR total!
Of course, it wasn't enough to get him into a "bandwagon" mode, or probably even a Jaffe-goes-tilt-at-windmills thang, but we can guarantee you that Ben Zobrist would have really appreciated receiving a few stray votes. And if anyone was perfectly set up to deliver one to him, it was Joe the P.
Who whiffed on it. And now, forevermore, ol' Joe will have to live with the fact that it wouldn't have mattered one whit if he'd left off a check mark alongside Ichiro's name, but it would have meant the world to Zobi won-Zenobi to have received at least one Hall of Fame vote. But Joe (and the rest of what that nasty old Tom Pynchon once called "the whole sick crew"...) just up and left Ben by the side of the road...
CONGRATS to Ichiro, C.C. Sabathia, and especially to Billy the Kid--who wasn't too proud to cry when he got the news. And remember--dissent is a good thing.
