Nothing intimidating about starting a dialogue, right?
That's what Ichiro Suzuki is hoping to do with the one voter who left him off the Hall of Fame ballot, leaving him one checkmark away from being the second-ever unanimous selection to Cooperstown.
"I was able to receive many votes from the writers and I'm grateful to them," Suzuki said through a translator at a press conference for the Hall of Fame inductees on Thursday. "But there was one writer that I wasn't able to get a vote from.
"I would like to invite him over to my house and we'll have a drink together and have a good chat."
Sharing a drink with a Hall of Famer? Doesn't sound like too bad a time. Surely Suzuki didn't mean anything other than that, right?
Suzuki, instead of joining legendary closer Mariano Rivera as the only unanimous selection, will now join Derek Jeter as the only Hall of Famers to be one vote shy of unanimous. So some might argue it's just as exclusive a list.
He earned 393 of a possible 394 votes — or 99.7 per cent of ballots.
Suzuki arrived in Seattle in 2001 at age 27 after already nearly a decade of success in his native Japan. In his first season, he had 242 hits to win the AL MVP and Rookie of the Year awards. Suzuki won 10 Gold Gloves and three Silver Sluggers over his 19-year MLB career while collecting 3,089 hits. He retired at age 45 with a .311 batting average in more than 2,653 games.
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