I don’t have a Hall of Fame vote yet, but if I’m fortunate enough to earn the privilege I’d consider it both an incredible honor and the realization of a lifelong goal. I know most Hall voters feel the same and take the responsibility seriously.

Yet when you get a group of nearly 400 people together, you’re not going to get people to agree on everything. Even something as seemingly obvious as Ichiro Suzuki being a no-doubt Hall of Famer.

Suzuki falling one vote short of unanimous induction was curious, and like everyone else I’d love to know who left him off their ballot and what their justification was. But in the grand scheme of things odd voting calls like that have become fewer and farther between, and it seems like these days the vast majority of voters recognize and reward greatness when they see it.

That wasn’t always the case.

In his recent column analyzing this year’s Hall of Fame vote, Jayson Stark of The Athletic dropped a nugget I’d never heard and couldn’t believe. Joe DiMaggio, one of the most famous and celebrated baseball players in history, once garnered only 44.3% of the vote from the BBWAA. That was in 1953, when he finished eighth. Eighth! He didn’t even get in the next year either, it took until Year 3 before DiMaggio was finally enshrined.

Again, we’re talking about Joe DiMaggio. You know, the guy who won three MVPs, earned 13 All-Star nods, batted .325 for his career, won nine World Series titles and put together a record 56-game hit streak that still stands to this day. Imagine seeing that resume and saying, “nah, I think I’ll vote for Dizzy Dean and Rabbit Maranville instead.”

That got me wondering what other bizarre Hall of Fame vote results there have been over the years. So I took a trip down the rabbit hole, and let me tell you, there have been some doozies.

The first few Hall of Fame ballots were stacked, which makes sense because at that point you had a 50-year backlog of candidates.

With a 10-player limit there were always going to be deserving players left out each year, but it still stood out that Cy Young didn’t even receive half the vote in his first try, getting 49.1% in the inaugural 1936 election. He made it the following year, but Rogers Hornsby — at worst a top-five position player all-time up to that point — actually saw his total drop from 46.5% to 26.4% in Year 2 and 17.6% in Year 3. He finally got in on his fifth ballot in 1942, with his wait stretched by two years after no votes were held between 1940-41.

Lefty Grove, then one of just 12 pitchers to record 300 career wins, only got 11.3% of the vote in 1945. He improved to 35.1% in 1946 before barely clearing 75% the following year. Jimmie Foxx debuted on the ballot in 1946 and got 12.9% despite ranking second all-time to Babe Ruth with 534 career home runs. It wound up taking until his seventh year of eligibility before Foxx finally got the call.

Maybe there’s some historical context I’m missing, but it’s difficult to imagine why any of those guys wouldn’t cruise in with 90% or more of the vote the moment their name hit the ballot. To poll under 20% and miss on multiple attempts? What were we thinking?

How about some more recent whiffs?

Yogi Berra, a three-time MVP, 18-time All-Star and 10-time World Series champion, was not a first ballot Hall of Famer. He got 67.2% of the vote in 1971 before going in the next year. Others who’d seem like no-brainers today included Whitey Ford (67.1% in 1973, elected in 1974), Eddie Mathews (32.3% in 1974, elected in 1978), Harmon Killebrew (59.6% in 1981, elected 1984), Juan Marichal (58.1% in 1981, elected 1983), Gaylord Perry (68% in 1989, elected 1991) and Carlton Fisk (66.4% in 1999, elected 2000). There have been plenty of others too.

Then of course, we go back to the issue of unanimity. Any list of the greatest baseball players of all-time would have guys like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron on it, and yet none of them received 100% of the vote. In almost 90 years the only player who ever has gone in unanimously was Mariano Rivera in 2019, though over the past decade several others have come close, like Ken Griffey Jr., Derek Jeter and now Suzuki.

Today’s BBWAA obviously still has a couple of contrarians among its ranks, but it’s nowhere near as influential a bloc as it once was. It’s a shame the person who left Suzuki off their ballot has taken some of the spotlight off the inductees, and decisions like that reflect poorly on the organization as a whole. For the record, the BBWAA has voted overwhelmingly in the past for all votes to be made public, or for votes to be public by default unless a voter opts out, but the Hall of Fame has refused to make those changes. Even still, the process is largely transparent and I’d argue no major American team sport does its Hall of Fame vote better.

Can anyone explain why Rodney Harrison keeps getting passed over for the Pro Football Hall of Fame? No, and we don’t even know if he’s ever come close because they don’t announce any voting totals. We don’t even know who makes up the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame’s voting committees, their process is as transparent as a black box.

With baseball, you have a steady drumbeat of columns and ballot reveals keeping eyes on the sport during what would otherwise be the slowest time of the year. That momentum culminates with the late-January vote announcement, and once the results are public we get to talk about who made the cut, who fell short by how much, yes, about the dummy who didn’t vote for Ichiro.

Could we do better? Absolutely, but if past results are any indication, we’ve come a long way.

While Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner rightfully got to celebrate after earning induction to the Hall of Fame this past Tuesday, two others who fell short should still feel great about how the night went.

Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones were the top two vote-getters of those who fell short of the 75% induction threshold, appearing on 70.3% and 66.2% of all ballots cast, respectively. History shows that the overwhelming majority of players who receive that large a vote share eventually make it to Cooperstown, and with a relatively weak class of first-year eligibles coming next year the two should be well positioned to earn election.

Beltran’s candidacy was complicated by his involvement in the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, but unlike with performance-enhancing drugs, it doesn’t appear voters believe his transgressions warrant a life sentence. After drawing 47.4% of the vote in his first attempt, he climbed to 57.1% last year and flipped at least 26 additional voters this year (per the Hall of Fame ballot tracker) to get over the 70% mark. He’s now just 17 votes shy of election, and with a resume that’s clearly Hall-worthy otherwise, he should have little trouble getting over the line next year.

If Jones is elected, he’ll have completed one of the biggest climbs in Hall of Fame voting history. His first year on the ballot Jones only polled at 7.3% and as recently as 2021 he was drawing only 33.9%. Since then it’s been a steady rise, and Jones seems to be benefitting from both the clearing of the steroid-era logjam and from a greater willingness to focus on a player’s peak versus longevity.

Jones, for the first decade of his career, was an all-time great. He won 10 consecutive Gold Gloves in center field, earned five All-Star nods and hit 368 home runs by the end of his age-30 season. Then injuries began taking their toll and Jones’s career fell off a cliff. He was one of the biggest free agent flops of the 21st century, flaming out after one disastrous year with the Dodgers in 2008, and was a shell of himself over the last five years of his career. He was also arrested on a domestic violence charge in 2012, an incident that may also play a factor in some voters’ opposition.

What should count more, those last five years or the full decade where Jones was without a doubt one of the best center fielders in MLB history? Increasingly voters seem to be deciding the latter, and now Jones has two more years to convince the remaining holdouts he belongs in Cooperstown.

Rowley’s Thomas White, a former Phillips Andover star drafted in the first round of the 2023 MLB Draft by the Miami Marlins, has continued his impressive rise as a professional and now ranks No. 33 on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list.

“The 6-foot-5 White took a step forward in his first full pro season on the strength of a mid-90s heater that touched 98 and a retooled breaking ball,” Baseball America writes. “White’s strike-throwing requires further maintenance. He has all the ingredients to front a rotation one day and doesn’t turn 21 until the end of September.”

White enjoyed a successful first full season of professional ball in 2024, posting a 2.81 ERA with 120 strikeouts over 96 innings across Low-A and High-A. He also took part in the Futures Game last July and will go into 2025 as the Marlins’ No. 1 prospect.