While we all enjoy the performative outrage of baseball medioids who found provocative insult and/or inexcusable stupidity in the one Hall of Fame vote that Ichiro Suzuki did not get when the results were released Tuesday, we have heard nothing about the unspecified number of voters for the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame who didn’t cast a ballot for him when Ichiro was inducted there earlier this week. This leads us to assume if nothing else that Japanese fans don’t have America’s unanimity fetish, let alone our propensity to be annoying scolds.
Suzuki was approved to headline the July dog-and-pony extravaganza in Cooperstown by 393 of the 394 participating voters, which meant of course that the hunt was on for the one recalcitrant Hall of Fame voter who either didn’t watch baseball for 19 consecutive years, forgot who he was voting for because nobody uses Ichiro’s last name, or was too excited to check off Troy Tulowitzki’s name to read the one after C.C. Sabathia. Whatever the reason, that was the main takeaway from Tuesday’s announcement—that everyone got a chance to screech about the one person who had disgraced and perhaps ruined baseball forever by not voting for one of the most obviously deserving players of his era.
