Three-time All-Star believes writers shouldn't vote for the Hall of Fame

From 1936-2015, no players were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame with even 99 percent of the Baseball Writers Association of America's vote.

A funny thing happened in the last nine years. Ken Griffey Jr. was listed on all but three ballots (99.3 percent) in 2016. Derek Jeter was listed on all but one (99.7 percent) in 2020. Mariano Rivera became the first unanimous choice in his only appearance on the BBWAA ballot in 2019.

For people who have only been paying attention to these percentages in the last decade or so, Tuesday's news that one BBWAA voter (not this one) left Ichiro Suzuki off their ballot came as a shock.

If that's you, sit down and swallow your coffee before reading this paragraph. Cy Young had to wait a year before the writers voted him in, in 1937, with 76.1 percent of the vote. In 1963, Jackie Robinson barely got the 75 percent of votes he needed for election (77.5 percent) in his first year of eligibility. Fifteen voters left Hank Aaron off their ballots in 1982, and if that wasn't the exact moment to take the Hall of Fame vote away from the writers, I don't know what was.

Actually, the time is now, Jered Weaver believes.

1 writer said no on Ichiro? 🙄 another example of why Hall of Famers should vote on it and not writers
— Jered Weaver (@Weave1036) January 22, 2025

"1 writer said no on Ichiro?" the three-time All-Star pitcher wrote on his Twitter/X account Wednesday, "another example of why Hall of Famers should vote on it and not writers."

There's another way of looking at Suzuki's vote totals: 392 voters got it right, one got it wrong, and that's a marked improvement from the time when 36 writers believed Jackie Robinson wasn't worthy of their Hall of Fame vote.

The Hall of Fame was a smaller institution then, so perhaps that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Still, the broader point holds: the voters got it right. Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner are Hall of Famers as of today.

Our cultural obsession with unanimity ignores the fact that the process did the thing it was designed to achieve: elect the most famous players to the Hall of Fame. It also ignores the fact that Suzuki was not even a unanimous selection to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame this year.

The biggest spoiler alert confronting Weaver, and others who would prefer writers not vote, is that unanimity is really difficult to achieve. And that's OK! Dissenting points of view should be encouraged — and the dissenters encouraged to speak up.

Ryan Spaeder polls retired major league players for their Hall of Fame selections on his website every offseason. Ichiro was left off one of the 81 ballots Spaeder collected this year. The retired player who left him off ... chose to remain anonymous.

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Three-time All-Star believes writers shouldn't vote for the Hall of Fame—but why now?

By J.P. Hoornstra | 12:30 PM EST