The Case For Seattle Mariners Legend Ichiro Suzuki to Be Unanimous Hall of Famer
The Seattle Mariners have seen a lot of team legends recognized by the Baseball Hall of Fame over the last decade.
Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson and Adrian Beltre are just a few of the players who once suited up for the Mariners that were enshrined in Cooperstown. And Ichiro Suzuki will likely increase the number of former Pacific Northwest legends enshrined in the Hall of Fame in just a few short months.
Suzuki is on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time and is all but certain to be one of the headline names for the 2025 class.
The better question is whether or not Seattle's all-time hit leader will be a unanimous selection.
Suzuki played 28 professional seasons. He signed with the Mariners and began his MLB career in 2001 after nine seasons in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball. He's one of two players in the history of the league who won Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season. He set the single-season hit record in 2004 (262) and has the record for the most hits by a professional baseball player all-time including his nine seasons in Japan (4,367).
OTD in 2001, Ichiro Suzuki became only the second player to win MVP and Rookie of the Year in the same season.pic.twitter.com/aZ7qBCL7TB
— MLB Vault (@MLBVault) November 20, 2020
Suzuki's accolades, records and nearly three-decade career make him a no-doubt Cooperstown inductee. And his impact on the Seattle is evident, even when it comes to the current roster.
An article published by MLB.com's Daniel Kramer explored the case for Suzuki to be a unanimous inductee. And the Mariners' current face of the franchise, Julio Rodriguez, spoke well of the legend in a quote from back in 2023 before the All-Star Game at Seattle's home field of T-Mobile Park:
“He's been through so many different things and I know he's such a wise man. And it's true. ... He's helped me out a lot."
Beyond his numbers and his ability as a player, Suzuki has also proved to be an icon for Japanese players. His instant success in the majors helped pave the way for other great Japanese-born players like Hideki Matsui, Yusei Kikuchi, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and arguably the best player in all of baseball today, Shohei Ohtani, just to name a few.
Suzuki spoke about his impact on current Japanese players before the 2023 All-Star Game, which Kramer included in his article:
“I felt like I really carried that on my shoulders. Like, people are going to judge the position players of Japan from the performance that I have here in MLB. And so I really took that to heart. I just wanted to make sure that, of course, failure was not an option. But even if I just had OK numbers, that wasn't good enough.”
There's been few players in the history of the league that have had the historical and cultural impact like Suzuki had.
Suzuki likely should be the second-ever unanimous Hall of Fame inductee after Mariano Rivera (inducted 2019). It's just a question about whether the hundreds of Baseball Writers' Association of America voters feel the same.
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