Who's the one Hall of Fame voter who didn't find Ichiro Suzuki worthy? It wasn't me!
It wasn’t me.
In my business, that knee-jerk response comes in handy. Fending off blame is a survival skill. A columnist knows he can’t fight a tidal wave of angry emails and social-media posts and, at some point, gives up trying to argue he is not, in fact, a nitwit. From there, it’s a short hop to a renunciation of any personal responsibility.
This time, however, I mean it. The lone Baseball Writers’ Association of America voter who chose not to check the box next to Ichiro Suzuki’s name?
It wasn’t me.
Three hundred and ninety-three members voted for Suzuki. One anonymous baseball writer did not.
Just to reiterate:
It wasn’t me.
I voted for Suzuki, Billy Wagner and Mark Buehrle.
Most voters make their votes public. I usually do, too, though through some combination of negligence and self-preservation, I hadn’t this year. I kept putting it off, possibly because somewhere in my subconscious I knew voting for Buehrle, the former White Sox ace, and not fellow pitcher CC Sabathia would paint me as a baseball imbecile, a flag-waving homer or both. And who wants to deal with Tony from the Bronx, who named his first son CC to honor the former Yankees pitcher and who knows a guy who could break my kneecaps for a reasonable fee?
Then the news came out that one voter had failed to make Suzuki’s election to the Hall of Fame unanimous. That, not Suzuki’s baseball brilliance, became the story. And suddenly people like me, people minding our own business, had a virtual horde of deputized posse members galloping after them in search of the mysterious idiot.
‘‘There’s one writer that I wasn’t able to get a vote from,’’ Suzuki said. ‘‘I would like to invite him over to my house, and we’ll have a drink together and we’ll have a good chat.’’
If you had known you’d get an invite for a drink at the great man’s home, would you have left him off your ballot? You might have. I didn’t.
You can take me off the Possibly Most Wanted List.
I voted for Suzuki, one of the best pure hitters in baseball history. There are very few players who look as though they’re going to get a hit every time they come to the plate. He was one of them. After coming to the Mariners from Japan in 2001, Suzuki hit higher than .300 and had more than 200 hits in each of his first 10 seasons. He won the American League Most Valuable Player and Rookie of the Year in the same season. He finished with 3,089 hits and a .311 batting average.
Voting for him is one of the biggest no-brainers in the history of no-brainers, right?
But here’s the beautiful thing about voting: Everyone comes to the ballot with their own judgments in mind, and they vote accordingly. If the results were predetermined, if everyone voted in unison for ‘‘worthy’’ candidates, we’d be living in Belarus.
Few people want to be known as the lone wolf, the misinformed wolf, the addled wolf.
But if someone doesn’t mind being the big, bad wolf, so what? Eleven people (out of 226) didn’t cast a Hall vote for Babe Ruth. It doesn’t make it right. It just proves that things happen and that people can be terribly, horribly weird.
‘‘The committee was amazed,’’ the Associated Press reported after the 1936 election. ‘‘Vote-counting stopped momentarily for a discussion of how anyone could leave the great Ruth off the list of immortals.’’
It’s possible — I would say highly possible — someone simply forgot to check the box next to Suzuki’s name. I could see it happening to me. Too many plates spinning. Too much time spent trying to figure out another way to write the McCaskeys don’t know what they’re doing with the Bears. Things get cloudy.
I didn’t forget to vote for Sabathia; I just didn’t see a Hall of Famer when I saw him pitch or looked at his numbers. I saw a guy who played 19 years and had only one season with an ERA lower than 3.00. He had 3,093 strikeouts, which is one of the biggest arguments for his induction. It’s the argument 86.8% of voters surely embraced.
Buehrle received 11.4% of the vote, not close to the 75% necessary for entrance into the Hall. But he was the picture of quality and consistency as a pitcher, having 14 consecutive seasons with at least 200 innings. In his final season, he pitched 198⅔ innings and led the AL with four complete games. He had a no-hitter and a perfect game during his career, a stunning accomplishment for someone who didn’t throw hard. And he helped the Sox win the 2005 World Series.
When Buehrle pitched, I always felt I was watching a master at work. I know that’s not the sturdiest foundation for a Hall argument, but the discrepancy in the vote totals for Sabathia and Buehrle don’t represent the talent gap, if there is one, between them. In fact, if I needed a pitcher to win one game, I would have picked Buehrle over Sabathia.
I would have picked Suzuki to get a hit against either of them.
‘‘Was that you?’’ a Suzuki posse member says, using a thumb and an index finger to squeeze his nostrils and ward off the smell of the ignorance that accompanies a ‘‘no’’ vote for Ichiro.
It wasn’t me.
But the Buehrle inclusion?
Yep, that was me.