{"id":50389,"date":"2025-01-22T16:37:43","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T21:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=50389"},"modified":"2025-01-24T16:37:49","modified_gmt":"2025-01-24T21:37:49","slug":"honestly-it-wouldve-been-more-surprising-had-it-been-unanimous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=50389","title":{"rendered":"Honestly, it would\u2019ve been more surprising had it been unanimous"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Shocker<\/a>: Ichiro voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but denied unanimous induction by one anonymous vote; reactions are as expected<\/span><\/p>\n

Like the subject says, it would\u2019ve been more surprising if Ichiro did get the vaunted unanimous decision and make it into the Hall of Fame with the most noteworthy of honors.\u00a0 But baseball has a problem in their legacy department, and they don\u2019t seem to be in any rush at all to try and alleviate it.\u00a0 So unsurprising to just about any baseball fan who knows how the voting process works, Ichiro does make the Hall of Fame, as predicted, but, as many have before him, failed to get 100% unanimity, and the part of the internet that cares about this, goes ballistic.<\/span><\/p>\n

The funny thing is that I predicted that this was probably going to happen<\/a> back in 2020, when I went on an identical diatribe about how fucked up it was that a single voter denied Derek Jeter the unanimous entry.\u00a0 I could just have easily just sticky\u2019d and reposted that old post, copy\/pasted the whole thing and just replaced \u201cDerek Jeter\u201d with \u201cIchiro\u201d and it would\u2019ve translated itself fairly seamlessly, but I\u2019m an old man who clearly likes to talk about the same shit over and over again, and am going through the futile exercise of writing about it again.<\/span><\/p>\n

So here we are again, where some anonymous voter is getting off at knowing that they alone have sparked the internet hate machine, and have thousands of keyboard warriors who want their head on a spike.\u00a0 Naturally, they\u2019re content with the chaos that they caused and will have absolutely no intention of revealing themselves, because that would assume a modicum of accountability they want to take, and people these days dodge accountability like they\u2019re agents from The Matrix<\/em> dodging bullets.<\/span><\/p>\n

People calling for credentials to be revoked, voting rules to be changed, more accountability and transparency; all logical and pragmatic ideas, but none of them are going to occur.\u00a0 I surmise the only way a vote is actually revoked is when the presumably old, white, guy croaks and he\u2019s physically unable to return a ballot for multiple years and the old white guys at the BBWAA offices start getting return to sender and get the message that the voter might have died.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lots of hypothetical guesses that it\u2019s the same guy who didn\u2019t vote for Jeter, and frankly, it wouldn\u2019t be too much of a stretch to put them in the same basket as the guys who didn\u2019t vote for Cal Ripken, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey, Jr., Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson, among other legends of the game where their inductions probably should have been unanimous.<\/span><\/p>\n

Personally, I\u2019ve been spouting off on random comment threads and accusing Bill Ballou out of Boston, because he\u2019s the dude who went on an arrogant diatribe<\/a> back in 2019 about how he didn\u2019t vote for Mariano Rivera, but just didn\u2019t turn in his ballot, thus still allowing him to get the only unanimous vote in HOF history, but someone somewhere rebutted to me that his vote this year was made public, and he did actually vote for Ichiro.\u00a0 Other names of baseball writers I\u2019ve never heard of have been thrown out there, but there are many, and none of them are taking the bait to defend themselves, and actually helping the cause of identifying the lone tryhard, so it’s really all futile all the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s the thing too \u2013 I don\u2019t even really like Ichiro, as a person.\u00a0 In the two World Baseball Classics he participated in, he got a little too uppity nationalistic and made disparaging remarks about Korea, despite Korea holding their own against his Japanese squad, and although the rest of the world\u2019s baseball fandom still idolizes him, I still see him as a bit of an asshole from that angle.\u00a0 But as a baseball player, there really were few better and consistent and talented as he was, and I respect all of his actual baseball accolades.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course he deserved to get in unanimously.\u00a0 For years, people have been coming up with reasons why he shouldn\u2019t get in, at all or first ballot, and throughout his tenure in MLB, he\u2019s knocked them all down.\u00a0 People loved to discount the 2,000+ hits he had in Japan, and said it would be cheating for him to add that to his hit total to surpass 3,000, so he just went ahead and notched 3,000+ hits in MLB alone.\u00a0 Along the way, he surpassed Pete Rose as the all-time leader in cumulative hits.\u00a0 Won numerous batting titles, gold gloves, and AL Rookie of the Year and MVP at the same time.\u00a0 Frankly, the only thing that eluded him was a World Series, but frankly that could happen to anyone who\u2019s majority was spent in Seattle<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But unsurprisingly, he was denied.\u00a0 Another legend, denied the ultimate honor, by a spineless, anonymous, most likely white guy, determined to upstage the whole idea of HOF voting in order to put themselves over.\u00a0 And the BBWAA as a whole doesn\u2019t seem to care, so it all but assures that this is going to happen continuously in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which means in 2027 when Albert Pujols shows up on the ballot, he basically already has a 0% chance of being unanimous.\u00a0 Forget about his multiple World Series rings with the Cardinals, the 700+ home runs, all the MVPs and other hardware.\u00a0 Forget about his charity, philanthropy and squeaky-clean image that made him look like a Dominican Mr. Clean.\u00a0 A voter somewhere is going to see 2027 as an opportunity to become the most wanted man on the internet with a 100% success rate of getting away with it, and completely capitalize on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The funny thing is that unlike Jeter, Ichiro probably does care that he didn\u2019t get unanimous.\u00a0 During the press conference, Ichiro basically started off talking about the one vote he didn\u2019t get, inviting the mystery voter out for a drink to have a talk<\/a>.\u00a0 American audiences guffawed about that one, but let\u2019s read between the lines here, Ichiro\u2019s Japanese honor code and general psychotic dedication to baseball says that he probably considers his entire baseball career a failure because of this one guy.\u00a0 And as I predicted a long time ago, I still think the man is going to fucking kill someone<\/a>, and this mystery voter has probably just climbed the list of people whom might be that someone.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shocker: Ichiro voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but denied unanimous induction by one anonymous vote; reactions are as expected Like the subject says, it would\u2019ve been more surprising if Ichiro did get the vaunted unanimous decision and make it into the Hall of Fame with the most noteworthy of honors.\u00a0 But baseball has … Continue reading Honestly, it would\u2019ve been more surprising had it been unanimous<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,17],"tags":[62,45,205,52,156,58,190,49],"class_list":["post-50389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","category-photos","tag-baseball","tag-fail","tag-mlb","tag-owned","tag-social-media","tag-sports","tag-white-people","tag-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50391,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50389\/revisions\/50391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}