Here’s the one big question about Ichiro’s Baseball Hall of Fame ballot

When voting results for the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2025 class are announced Tuesday, Mariners icon Ichiro Suzuki will become the first Asian player to earn election into the sport’s most prestigious club.

Of that, there is no doubt.

The only real question looming is whether Ichiro becomes the first position player in Major League Baseball history to receive a unanimous selection.

A singular star with a signature style, Ichiro had a career defined by firsts. He was the first Japanese position player to play in MLB, and he ranks first on baseball’s all-time hits list when combining his totals from Japan and the majors.

And on most afternoons during the baseball season, he is still the first person in uniform to take the field before a Mariners game.

It’s been nearly six years since Ichiro retired, and yet right field remains the 51-year-old’s daily domain throughout the season at T-Mobile Park.

On most summer afternoons he will step onto the pristine outfield grass and go through his familiar workout routine - stretching, throwing and shagging fly balls and, after all that, several rounds of hitting in an indoor batting cage - that remains as meticulous as it was during his 19-year major league career.

“Even though I retired as an active player, baseball and Seattle have never left my heart,” Ichiro said during his induction into the Mariners’ team Hall of Fame on Aug. 27, 2022. “Baseball will forever be my soul.”

This year the opposite will formally come true, too. Ichiro will forever be embedded into the soul of the sport when he is enshrined this summer into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., a ceremony that is sure to capture widespread fanfare here and in Japan.

The 2025 class will be announced Tuesday when the results of voting from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America are unveiled at 3 p.m. PST on MLB Network.

Another Mariners icon, Ken Griffey Jr., fell three votes shy of unanimity in 2016, and the New York Yankees’ Derek Jeter came up one vote short in 2020.

Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ legendary relief pitcher inducted in 2019, is the only player to earn a unanimous selection.

The BBWAA, which has overseen Hall of Fame voting since 1936, sent ballots to 400 writers for the 2025 class. To be eligible to vote, members must be active baseball writers for 10 years. (Two Seattle Times sports writers, Ryan Divish and Tim Booth, are Hall of Fame voters.)

In the first 165 ballots revealed publicly over the past month, Ichiro was named on all 165. Longtime Mariners ace Felix Hernandez, who like Ichiro is eligible for the Hall of Fame for the first time, has had an encouraging debut on the ballot, receiving roughly 25% of the publicly revealed votes.

To earn election a player must receive 75% of BBWAA votes. (To remain on the ballot next year a player must receive 5% of the votes, and the debate about Hernandez’s candidacy, it appears, should carry over into 2026.)

BBWAA members are not required to make their ballots public.

“While I don’t see how any writer in their right mind could object to [Ichiro’s] election ... recent history shows the cloak of anonymity can do strange things,” Jay Jaffe, author of The Cooperstown Casebook, wrote recently for the baseball site FanGraphs. “None of the writers who omitted Griffey or Jeter have ever been identified, but within a body of roughly 400 voters there will always be a few petty and selfish ones who make the process about themselves.”

Unanimous or not, Ichiro cemented his place among the game’s all-time best with his transcendent style on the field.

After beginning his pro career in Japan with the Orix Blue Wave - during which he won seven batting titles, three MVPs and a Japan Series championship - Ichiro in 2001 became the first Japanese position player to make the jump to MLB in 2001, at age 27.

The Mariners, initially, were not quite sure what they had in Ichiro, and the rest of the major leagues wasn’t prepared for what was about to hit the sport.

“Everyone wondered at the beginning how he would adjust to the major league game, but that was the wrong question, it turned out,” venerable baseball columnist Larry Stone wrote for The Times after Ichiro’s retirement in 2019. “The MLB game had to adjust to Ichiro, who in those early days, when his skills were still at their peak, confounded opponents in every way.”

Ichiro, who has remained part of the Mariners organization as a special assistant to the chairman, won the American League MVP and Rookie of the Year awards in 2001, leading the majors in batting average (.350), hits (242) and stolen bases (56), and helping the Mariners surge to a league-record 116 wins.

From 2001 to 2010 Ichiro made 10 consecutive All-Star teams, won 10 consecutive Gold Gloves and was a fixture batting leadoff and playing right field for the Mariners. No one did either better than Ichiro, and no one did it with greater devotion to his craft.

A magician with a bat in his hand, he finished his MLB career with 3,089 hits, and when paired with his hit total in Japan (1,278), his 4,367 hits as a professional are more than any player in baseball history.

In 2004 he broke the all-time season hits record (with 262) that seems likely never to be broken.

He’s one of the greatest defensive right fielders in MLB history, one of the greatest base runners in MLB history, and his greatness will be formally recognized soon enough in Cooperstown.

This story was originally published January 17, 2025 at 12:47 PM with the headline "Here’s the one big question about Ichiro’s Baseball Hall of Fame ballot."