Culture
Will Ichiro Suzuki be the baseball Hall of Fame’s second unanimous selection?
Could Ichiro Suzuki become the second-ever player unanimously voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum? Will Billy Wagner pick up the five votes he missed last year to gain entry in his final year of eligibility? Will CC Sabathia make it to Cooperstown on his first try?
Heading into the Jan. 21 announcement of the Hall of Fame voting results, all three scenarios are on the table.
The voting is conducted by the nearly 400 eligible voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America; all of the 151 ballots logged on Ryan Thibodaux’s Baseball Hall of Fame tracker as of Tuesday afternoon have the box next to Suzuki’s name checked.
To this point, only famed Yankee closer Mariano Rivera has been elected to the Hall of Fame unanimously — not Babe Ruth, not Hank Aaron, not Ken Griffey Jr. nor Derek Jeter, just Rivera. Could Suzuki be the second?
Thibodaux said he doesn’t expect an answer to that until after the results are official.
“We haven’t seen him left off of any ballots yet and my guess is we won’t see one up until the results are announced,” Thibodaux said in a direct message on Bluesky earlier this week. “If anyone left him off, we likely won’t find out until after, if at all.”
Jeter was left off one ballot in 2020 and Griffey three in 2016.
Voters are not required to make their ballots public, but the Hall of Fame does allow voters to check a box on the ballot to release their selections following the announcement of the voting. Last year, a total of 385 ballots were returned, with 306 voters choosing to make their ballot public. Neither the voter who passed over Jeter in 2020 nor the three who left Griffey off their ballots in 2016 have been revealed.
Suzuki is not the only candidate trending towards induction. Sabathia is on 140, or 92.7 percent, which bodes well for the first-year nominee.
“I’ll admit to being a bit surprised at the strength of CC’s support so far. I had him eyeballed as perhaps a 75 percent bubble candidate, but he’s breezed along so far and has comfortably been in the low 90s for most of ballot season,” Thibodaux wrote. “Unless the late public and private voters have a wildly different evaluation of Sabathia’s credentials, it looks like he’ll be a first-ballot Hall of Famer.”
FanGraphs’s Jay Jaffe, author of “The Cooperstown Casebook,” said he’s been surprised by Sabathia’s showing in his first year on the ballot.
“I thought he was going to be somebody who would squeak in like (Joe) Mauer did last year,” said Jaffe, who created the Jaffe War Score system (JAWS) that is commonly referenced by Hall of Fame voters to help put candidates into historical perspective. “I don’t expect him to stay at 92 percent or even 90 percent, but I think something upwards of 80 percent is very likely.”
Wagner is on the ballot for the 10th and final time. After just missing the 75 percent mark a year ago, he’s trending steadily toward induction. As of Tuesday afternoon, he was at 84.1 percent on the public ballots.
It’s not just the raw numbers that are in Wagner’s favor; the trends are behind him, as well. After just missing out, he’s been added to eight ballots that didn’t include him last year and of the 141 public votes submitted, none who checked his name last year haven’t selected him this year. Another eight first-time voters have voted for Wagner, as well.
“There are still more first-time voters out there and he’ll need to maintain solid support from that group,” Thibodaux wrote. “There are also likely several dozen voters who aged out of the electorate this year. If he happened to have extremely strong support among them, then there still may be work to do to get him over the finish line.”
Carlos Beltrán was at 79.5 percent of the vote as of Tuesday afternoon and Andruw Jones was just below the threshold at 74.2 percent. According to Thibodaux, last year those who made their ballots public before the announcement averaged 7.55 votes per ballot. Voters who waited until after the announcement averaged 6.77 votes per ballot and private ballots averaged 5.8 names. Thibodaux, who began tracking balloting in 2012, said those trends have been steady through the years.
The current voting totals are not encouraging for Beltrán or Jones in relation to their 2025 hopes, but it is a positive for eventual induction. Next year’s first-year eligible class doesn’t have any players who have a career bWAR of 60 or more, such as Suzuki (60) and Sabathia (62.3). The top first-year players on next year’s ballot are Cole Hamels (59 bWAR) and Ryan Braun (47.1 bWAR).
Jaffe said the strength of Sabathia’s support bodes well for the future of not just Sabathia, but also Andy Pettitte, Félix Hernández, Mark Buehrle and Hamels.
“Andy Pettitte and Félix Hernández are almost diametrically opposed in terms of how they’ve gotten to this point, Pettitte with a very workmanlike career and a huge volume of postseason work that was very important in helping teams get to and win the World Series,” Jaffe said. “Félix had a very high peak and a lack of longevity, early burnout and no postseason experience.”
Pettitte, on the ballot for the seventh time, was at 31.8 percent as of Tuesday afternoon. Last year, Pettitte received 52 (13.5 percent) votes and this year he is already marked on 48 ballots, indicating a significant jump. Hernández, in his first year on the ballot, was on 25.2 percent of the votes revealed by Tuesday afternoon.
While the focus on voting is always on the 75 percent line needed for induction, the other marker to watch is the 5 percent needed to stay on the ballot.
Of the 14 names on the ballot for the first time, seven had not received a public vote as of Tuesday morning. Of the remaining seven first-year eligible players, only Suzuki, Sabathia, Hernández and Dustin Pedroia (12.6 percent) have received the necessary five percent to stay on the ballot.
That means 10 players are in danger of falling off the ballot, including a pair of catchers in Russell Martin (4.6 percent) and Brian McCann (4 percent) who would fall off the ballot after just their first year. Also facing the possibility of not receiving 5 percent are Torii Hunter (1.3 percent), who is on the ballot for the fifth time, and Francisco Rodríguez (7.9 percent), who is on the ballot for the third year. Mark Buehrle, on his fifth ballot, has 19 votes as of Tuesday morning, which will be enough to keep him on the ballot another year as long as no more than 380 ballots are returned. One more vote for Buehrle between Tuesday afternoon and next week’s announcement would guarantee the longtime Chicago White Sox starter a spot on next year’s ballot.
(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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