Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner Elected to the Hall of Fame

Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner have been elected to Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame. They join Dick Allen and Dave Parker, who were elected to the Hall by one of the era committees in December.

As one can see in the voting results, Suzuki was named on every ballot except for one. (Therefore, Mariano Rivera remains the only player who has ever been elected to the Hall unanimously by the baseball writers.) Suzuki and Sabathia are both in their first year of eligibility, and Billy Wagner is in his 10th and final year of eligibility. I initially thought that Sabathia would get about 50% of the vote in his first year, but I saw quickly from the vote tracker (which I follow religiously every year) that he was going to make it this year. For Suzuki, the only question is whether or not he'd be elected unanimously. Wagner missed election last year by a measly 5 votes, so it was clear that he'd make it this year.

The strong election of Sabathia, the stronger-than-I-expected debut of Féliz Hernández (who got 20.6% of the vote), and the big gains of Andy Pettite (who roughly doubled his vote percentage from last year to 27.9% after making essentially no progress for several years) illustrate that the writers are looking much more intelligently than they used to at what constitutes a Hall-of-Fame starting pitcher.

Carlos Beltrán made a lot of progress to reach 70.3% of the vote. The newcomers on the 2026 ballot constitute a weak field, so Beltrán will surely be elected in 2026 and the other holdovers should make strong progress. Andruw Jones improved a little bit to 66.2%, and he may well be elected next year. I think it's about 50/50 that Jones gets elected in 2026 — a selection of ESPN baseball writers are much more optimistic than I am — but I am confident that he'll make it in 2027 (his 10th and final year of eligibility) if he does not make it in 2026. Jones barely survived the 5% cut on the ballot in his first couple of years, so he's made a ton of progress since then. Chase Utley also made a lot of progress this year, going from 28.8% of the vote to 39.8% of it. I expect that he will surpass 50% next year, but I think that he's likely still a few years from election.

Update: Here is Jay Jaffe's post to summarize the voting results and his thoughts on them. The navigation bar at the top of that website gives hyperlinks to his other articles for the 2025 Hall of Fame voting cycle.