COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The quiet, tundra-battered streets of Cooperstown looked just a little different Tuesday evening than they’ll look July 27 — and not just because you’ll be able to ditch those parkas and snow shovels.
Main Street in Cooperstown has never before been confused with Little Tokyo. But that’s about to happen. Ichiro Suzuki’s Induction Day is roaring right at us. And it was going to be a celebration for the ages even before Ichiro made history one more time Tuesday, by flying into the Baseball Hall of Fame with an incredible 99.7 percent of the vote, appearing on all but one ballot.
But it won’t be just the Ichiro Show. It will be CC Sabathia’s Induction Day, too. And if you’re familiar with CC’s work — and immense presence — you know it’s hard to imagine him being overshadowed by anyone, even Ichiro. That’s as true as ever after a stunning showing in this election, in which he attracted a massive 86.8 percent of the vote in his first year on the Baseball Writers’ Association of America ballot — more than Bob Gibson (84.0 percent).
How’s that for two magnetic attractions atop the Cooperstown marquee? An international baseball rock star and a beloved Yankees icon (who also made memorable stops in Cleveland and Milwaukee). But also …
Is Cooperstown ready for Billy Wagner? It had better be, because it’ll be his Induction Day, too.
The most unhittable left-handed closer in history finally nudged his vote total above the 75 percent threshold needed for election — in his 10th and final year on the ballot. A year after the voters broke Wagner’s heart, by leaving him five agonizing votes short, they let him know what the thrill of election victory feels like.
He made it by 29 votes this time, finishing with 82.5 percent. It was the second-smallest margin by any candidate in history who got elected in his final try.
Now add in Dave Parker and the late Dick Allen, who were elected by the Classic Baseball Era Committee last month — plus the great Tom Hamilton from Cleveland, the broadcasting honoree, and baseball writing legend Thomas Boswell, who is headed for the writers’ wing. And this will be one of the most memorable induction weekends in the history of baseball’s Magic Kingdom.
As we wait for that celebration — and, hopefully, for about a 90-degree spike in the Main Street thermometers — here are Five Things We Learned from the 2025 Hall of Fame election.
PlayerVotesPercent
1. Will anyone ever hit their way to unanimity?
It’s now six years since Mariano Rivera stomped out the most absurd tradition in sports — by becoming the first player elected unanimously to the Hall of Fame. Wouldn’t you have thought someone would have joined him by now? But I guess it was always a harebrained idea to think the first unanimous position player would be Ichiro — if only because …
He’s a man who had zero hits on this side of the Pacific until age 27.
But then came the leadup to Tuesday’s election announcement. And as the public votes rolled in – all of them chronicled by Ryan Thibodaux’s essential Baseball Hall of Fame Tracker — Ichiro was still unanimous, through 30 percent of the votes, through 40 percent, through 50 percent.
So it was hard not to get caught up in the remarkable story of this man, who journeyed from the Orix Buffaloes to Lou Piniella’s Seattle Mariners in 2001, bashed 242 hits as a “rookie” and then went on to pretty much break baseball for the next decade.
What do 4,367 hits — 3,089 of them after he arrived on our shores — earn a man? How about 393 votes out of 394 votes cast … and a plaque in one of his favorite towns on Earth.
Sure, we knew the history. Babe Ruth wasn’t unanimous. Henry Aaron wasn’t unanimous. Willie Mays wasn’t unanimous. Even here in the theoretically more enlightened times of the 21st century, Derek Jeter and Ken Griffey Jr. didn’t reel in 100 percent of the votes. But a man who didn’t even get started until he was 27 nearly outpolled all of them. (Jeter, of course, fell one vote short of unanimity in 2020.)
Jeter had four World Series rings and over 1,000 hits before he reached age 27. Griffey had thumped more home runs (238) before his 27th birthday than Paul Molitor hit in his whole career (234).
So I don’t know what the odds were of having a man who had done literally none of that, at that age, bash down the doors of the Unanimity Club. But I’d begun to think that Ichiro was so good, so charismatic and so breathtakingly different from anyone we’d ever seen play baseball, he was just the man to go where no position player had gone before.
Instead, he merely joins this exclusive collection of outfielders before him who missed being unanimous by fewer than 10 votes:
VOTES SHORT PLAYERPERCENTAGE
If even Ichiro couldn’t master the power of unanimity, how can we not ask: Who’s the next unanimous Hall of Famer going to be?
It seems like such a simple question. But is it, really? It won’t happen next year, when Cole Hamels and Ryan Braun are the biggest names joining the ballot. How about Buster Posey in 2027? Um, just a reminder that he finished his career with only 1,500 hits — so take the under.
But then we get Albert Pujols in 2028 and Miguel Cabrera in 2029. And if it’s not them, let’s just start tossing names into the wind: Justin Verlander? Clayton Kershaw? Max Scherzer? Shohei Ohtani? Some kid who’s in the third grade right now?
Aw, who the heck knows? Just be grateful there was a baseball-playing human named Ichiro. He made the sport such a magical place. And he’s about to do the same for the wondrous little paradise known as Cooperstown, N.Y.
The Ichiro Collection: 6 stories from our archives as Cooperstown beckons
2. Even the ‘Small Hall’ voters love CC Sabathia
Two months ago, I had zero confidence that CC Sabathia was about to become a first-ballot Hall of Famer, let alone a guy who barely missed pulling in a higher vote percentage (86.8) than Sandy Koufax (86.9). Did you?
Were you sure that hundreds of voters were really going to look past CC’s 3.74 ERA, the highest of any left-handed starter in the Hall? I wasn’t. But that answer was: Who cares? He’s CC Freaking Sabathia.
Because so many voters recognized the powerful combination of dominance and dignity that Sabathia represented for most of his career, he cleared that 75 percent bar by an astounding 46 votes. And that means he’s now a member of the coolest club he’s ever joined:
The First-Ballot Left-Handed Starters Club.
It won’t take an hour to call the roll at this club’s meetings — because there are only five members:
• Sandy Koufax (1972)
• Steve Carlton (1994)
• Tom Glavine (2014)
• Randy Johnson (2015)
• CC Sabathia (2025)
(The Warren Spahn Fan Club would like me to add his name, too, incidentally, on the grounds that it shouldn’t count that he appeared on the 1958 ballot seven years before he retired, then was elected on his first try after he retired. But he’ll have to wait in the Technicality Room.)
So why did Sabathia join those legends — and why did he do that so decisively? It’s because he cashed in votes from an unexpected source: “Small Hall” voters, the group least likely to vote for any quasi-marginal candidate.
For the definition of “Small Hall” voters and an incisive breakdown of how they voted, I turned to my friend Jason Sardell, the most accurate Hall election analyst on Earth. Sardell generally defines a Small Hall voter as someone who voted for five players or fewer last year. (He has a separate addendum for voters who try to make a point by voting for Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, but we don’t need to go there now.)
Suffice it to say, he pays close attention to those voters. And even he was surprised by Sabathia’s popularity with that group — at least among those who have publicly revealed their ballots so far.
Joe Mauer squeaked over the election bar by only four votes last year. So he’s the perfect litmus test for how the Small Hall crowd looks at players who don’t seem like slam-dunk cases. But when you compare his Small Hall vote a year ago with Sabathia’s votes from that same group, you see why CC just breezed into Cooperstown.
Mauer — 57 percent
Sabathia — 80 percent
Sardell then broke down that voting bloc even more closely. He looked only at Small Hall voters who did not check Mauer’s name last year — and was stunned to find that 73 percent of those same voters did vote for Sabathia this year.
So why did CC get to enjoy such a stress-free election night? I think that explains it!
‘That’s for you, b—’: Why Yankees great CC Sabathia was a Hall of Fame teammate
3. For Billy Wagner, it’s finally closing time
Did Hall of Fame voters torture Billy Wagner for long enough before finally electing him? Let’s all answer, Yes!, to that. But here’s the good news for the newest Hall of Fame closer: They’re done!
Wagner received 325 votes in this election — 41 more than last year. And while that was enough to clear the bar, it was hard not to notice that he still only added the second-fewest votes of anyone who has made it in his final try, at least since annual voting began more than 50 years ago.
THE LAST-TIMERS CLUB
PLAYERYEARVOTES ADDED
(*Elected in 15th year under previous rules)
Of course, he went in needing only five more votes. So I guarantee he doesn’t give a hanging slider where he ranks on that chart.
And if it’s any consolation, he’s not the only closer the voters have forced to twist in the balloting wind. It’s practically turning into our brand.
You can exclude Mariano from that group, obviously … and Rollie Fingers (elected in his Year 2) … and Dennis Eckersley (Year 1) if you want to count him as a reliever. But none of the other five closers elected by the baseball writers just breezed on in.
Trevor Hoffman may have made it in Year 3 — but don’t let that fool you. He probably thought it was a cinch when he got 67.9 percent in his first election. Ha. It still took him two more years to collect those final 34 votes he needed.
But he had it easy compared with Bruce Sutter (elected in Year 13), Goose Gossage (Year 9) and Hoyt Wilhelm (Year 8). So Wagner fits right in with that crew.
And let’s recall that Hoffman also missed by five votes the year before his election, then added only 5.9 percentage points to his total the next year. You would think Wagner’s voters would mirror those Hoffman voters. But nope! Tough crowd.
According to Adam Dore, who studies the Wagner vote for the Hall of Fame Tracker, 19 current voters who once voted for Hoffman have revealed their 2025 ballots. Of those 19, only seven (36.8 percent) checked Wagner’s name on their ballots this year.
That’s surprisingly small. But whatever! It no longer matters who didn’t vote for him. It only matters that finally, 325 voters did — including 18 of 18 first-time voters who have made their ballots public.
It’s been 5,224 days since Billy Wagner saved a game in the big leagues. But on Tuesday, he finally closed out the toughest save of his life.
It’s closing time for Billy Wagner’s Hall of Fame case — and he’s feeling the weight of the wait
4. See you at Carlos Beltrán/Andruw Jones Induction Day — on July 26, 2026
There once was a time when it seemed like a Carlos Beltrán or Andruw Jones Induction Day might never happen.
Beltrán wore the stains of Houston trash-can lids when he first appeared on the ballot in 2023. And who knew how these voters would handle the Astros’ brand of sign-swiping “cheating” — compared with their hard line against those notorious PED “cheaters.”
Then there was Jones. In his first two years on the ballot, in 2018-19, he attracted a minuscule 7.3 percent and 7.9 percent of the vote, respectively. And no player has ever made that climb, from 7 percent to election, in the history of this voting.
And with good reason. Just do the math. Back when Jones was getting 7.3 and 7.9 percent, even if he later got nine times as many votes, he still wouldn’t have had enough to get elected — because he was nearly 300 short.
Yet here we are, six elections later, and Andruw has practically found those votes. When the ballot counting was finished Tuesday, here’s where you could find the two closest runners-up:
PLAYER PERCENTAGE VOTES SHORT
So here’s as safe a prediction as it’s possible to make about what lies ahead: A year from now, both of those men will be writing the speeches of a lifetime … because they look like locks to get elected. Here’s why:
It’s a first-ballot wasteland in 2026. When it comes to the ballot, it’s one of those years, with only two first-year candidates who even topped 35 career wins above replacement, according to Baseball-Reference.
One is Hamels (59.0), who probably had enough special moments to avoid being one-and-done — but has no path to first-ballot election sizzle. The other is Braun (47.1), whose suspension for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drugs policy, and the embarrassing denials that preceded it, will torpedo any chance he might have had.
So if voters are in the mood to elect somebody, as they normally are, Beltrán and Jones are all lined up to be those somebodies.
Carlos, say hello to Ryne Sandberg. Just from the surge in Beltrán’s vote totals last year, it was clear that only a small slice of the electorate was still looking at him as some sort of “cheater” pariah. So if that means he’s now basically just another normal candidate, I was curious about what history told us about his chances of election.
I dug through voting results over the last 50 years and was surprised to find only one player whose journey toward election looked remotely similar to Beltrán’s.
I was looking for players who got between 40 percent and 50 percent in their first year on the ballot, then jumped by 10 percentage points in each of the next two years. The only player who fit that mold was a fellow named Ryne Sandberg, who was elected in 2005. Here’s how his three years on the ballot compare with Beltrán’s.
SANDBERGBELTRÁN
(*elected)
So if we go by that model, it’s easy to project a Beltrán election day next year. But here’s another indicator: Todd Helton. They’re not identical, because Helton’s first two years on the ballot, at 16.5 percent and 29.2 percent, respectively, were just his warmup act. But after that, look at the next three years.
HELTON BELTRÁN
How’d it go for Helton the following year (2024)? He got elected, of course. And Beltrán could easily follow that trail.
The Andruw Bounce was back. Have I mentioned in the last few paragraphs that as recently as 2019, Jones was still nearly 300 votes away from getting elected? Think how hard it is to flip 300 votes in an election in which there aren’t even 400 voters. That’s never been done. But …
As the ballot cleared between 2020 and 2023, Andruw started flying up the board. He rocketed from under 8 percent to more than 58 percent in just four elections, adding nearly 200 votes. But then a funny thing happened last year. His rocket never left the pad, and he added only 11 votes — the smallest increase of anyone on the upper tier of the ballot.
So this looked like a pivotal year. It was his eighth spin through this electorate. And he’s running short of time. But he bounced back, adding 4.6 percentage points and 24 votes. So he’s right there now, just 35 votes away.
Thanks to data provided by Jason Sardell, we know that jump was propelled by significant gains among “Large Hall” and “Medium Hall” voters. But one final big obstacle remains: some lingering skepticism from “Small Hall” voters.
According to Sardell, 83 percent of that group left Jones off their ballots last year. He flipped only 14 percent of those voters this year, among those who made their ballots public.
So he needs to keep on flipping if he wants the chiselers of Cooperstown to start working on his plaque. But he’s now so close, I’m gazing into my Ouija Board and seeing a 2026 trip to the podium.
And when have I ever been wrong about this stuff? (Author’s note: Don’t answer that!)
5. Chase Utley, Andy Pettitte and the 90 percent solution
A few other things that caught my eye:
WATCH OUT FOR UTLEY — Let’s look at the players on this ballot who made the biggest jumps — because there’s always a story behind those jumps.
PLAYER INCREASE 2025 2024
In every column I’ve written about this election, I’ve made a prediction that might not even go wrong for a change. I think Chase Utley is going to get elected one of these years. And his pole vault in this election, from 28 percent to nearly 40 percent, makes me feel even more sure that that’s where this is headed.
But before I break that down for you, we interrupt this analysis with an incredible tidbit about how Utley’s superstar peak compares with all other second basemen in history. (Hat tip: Anthony Calamis, of the Hall of Fame Tracker staff.)
SECOND BASEMEN WITH AT LEAST FIVE STRAIGHT YEARS WITH A .900 OPS*
PLAYER STREAKYEARS
(*Had enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title)
(Source: Lee Sinins’ Complete Baseball Encyclopedia)
In other words, only one second baseman who has debuted in the past 100 years has had five seasons like that in a row — or five at any point in his career, for that matter. And that man is Chase Utley. Feel free to file that away for next year. But in other news, what makes me think he’s on track to get elected? Because of a guy named Billy Williams.
Williams played alongside Ernie Banks on the Cubs in the 1960s and was elected to the Hall in 1987. So why do I bring him up now? Because you have to go back four decades to see that the last player to debut on the ballot in the 20s and then jump to over 40 percent in Year 2 was … yep, Billy Williams.
WILLIAMS UTLEY
So what happened after that? Williams increased his vote over the next four elections — to 50.1 percent, then 63.8, then 74.1, then 85.7. He got elected in his sixth year on the ballot. And could that happen again, with Utley? Why the heck not!
PETTITTE’S RIDE ON THE CC EXPRESS — It’s Andy Pettitte’s seventh year on the ballot. This year looked a little different from the first six!
First six elections — Got between 9.9 percent and 17.0 percent in all six — and actually dropped to 13.5 percent last year.
Year 7 — Suddenly catapulted all the way up to 27.9 percent.
So what changed? It’s obvious what changed. His former teammate on the Yankees, Sabathia, showed up on the ballot this year — with remarkably similar career stats.
PITCHER W-LWARERA+
(Source: Baseball-Reference)
I’ve already written a column about how Sabathia’s arrival on the ballot inspired me to take a deeper look at Pettitte’s career — which eventually led me to vote for him for the first time. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one.
But now here’s the bad news: Only Larry Walker has ever jumped from under 30 percent to election in his last three years on the ballot. So there’s that.
And here’s one more odd, but ominous, historical nugget. In the history of this election, no left-handed starter has ever been elected after his sixth year on the ballot. Lefty Grove got elected in Year 6 in 1947. And no left-hander has broken that record since.
So the chances of Pettitte soaring into Cooperstown in the next three years are slim. But if he continues to rise, is there an Era committee that could take note of how he took off in his final years on the ballot? Of course!
THE 90 PERCENT CLUB — Finally, we spent so much time fixating on whether Ichiro would be unanimous, we almost missed the big picture:
Whether we slap that “UNANIMOUS” label on these players or not, at least modern voters are proving they’re way less stingy than their BBWAA ancestors — a group that once handed Joe DiMaggio a ridiculous 44.3 percent of the vote.
Behold the monster vote totals for the legends of the last quarter-century.
• Ichiro is the seventh player to rake in at least 97 percent of the vote since 2014. There had been just seven before that in all previous elections combined.
• Ichiro is the eighth player to attract at least 95 percent of the vote since 2014. How incredible is that? Let’s not count the Babe Ruth/Ty Cobb/Honus Wagner/Walter Johnson four-pack in the first Hall of Fame election ever in 1936. In between that election and 2014, only six players had reached 95 percent — over nearly 80 years worth of balloting.
• Ichiro was also the 11th player to surpass 90 percent since 2014 (not even counting Jim Thome’s 89.9 percent in 2018). Before that run, only eight players reached the 90 percentiles in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s combined.
• And Ichiro was the fourth player to reach 99 percent (or higher) since 2014, joining Rivera, Jeter and Griffey. You know how many legends had reached those heights before then? That would be … not one!
So I don’t know what was going on when those baseball writers of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s were adjusting their straw fedoras and looking for reasons not to vote for the greatest players who ever lived. Just know that here in the 21st century, we’re doing the opposite.
When we see a truly transcendent player on these ballots, we check his name — at rates never before seen in Hall of Fame voting history. So whether Ichiro was unanimous or not, he’s a reminder that we’ve actually spent the last decade proving we’re not the goofballs we’re often made out to be. Just don’t let that get around!
Hall of Fame ballot columns from The Athletic
Stark: My 2025 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot — the 10 players I voted for, and why
Baseball Hall of Fame ballots 2025: The Athletic’s voters explain their selections
Rosenthal: Why CC Sabathia received my Hall of Fame vote this year and Andy Pettitte did not
More Hall of Fame coverage
‘That’s for you, b—’: Why Yankees great CC Sabathia was a Hall of Fame teammate
Baseball Hall of Fame reader survey results: How Ichiro, Wagner, Sabathia and more fared
A salute to Ichiro, CC Sabathia and the other 12 newcomers to the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot
Baseball Hall of Fame tiers: Which active players are on course for Cooperstown?
(Top image: Meech Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: CC Sabathia: Paul Bereswill / Getty Images; Ichiro Suzuki: Lisa Blumenfeld / Getty Images; Billy Wagner: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
