BBWAA voters are a small group with a very big responsibility. We should be willing to talk about it. Or write about it. It’s what we do.

To no one's surprise, Ichiro Suzuki is a Baseball Hall of Famer. Also to no one's surprise, he had the most on-brand reaction to this legacy-defining development. On Thursday, the Seattle Mariners released a video of Ichiro receiving the phone call with the news

Ichiro Suzuki is all about baseball, but he is much more than that at home in Japan. Ichiro is a wellspring of national pride — like Shohei Ohtani now — and his fame across the Pacific was therapeutic as the national economy sputtered through the so-called lost decades.

If that remains the case when the final results are released by the Baseball Writers Association of America on Tuesday, Ichiro will be the first Japanese-born player in the Hall of Fame and just the second player ever to be unanimously elected to Cooperstown.

Ichiro received 99.7 percent of the vote to earn election to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. The M's released the video of what the call from the Hall of Fame sounded late.

Of course I voted for Ichiro Suzuki - along with the other no-brainers on the ballot, including CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner. Pity that Carlos Beltran came up short again, and that Andruw Jones is still stuck in no man’s land.

Ichiro Suzuki became the first Japanese player chosen for baseball’s Hall of Fame, falling one vote shy of unanimous when he was elected along with CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner.

Willie McGee won the National League MVP or the 1985 season, in which he hit just 10 home runs. McGee also batted .353. Vince Coleman scored 107 runs that season, and he had more than three times as many stolen bases (110) as he had extra-base hits (31). The leading home run hitter on the team, Jack Clark, hit just 22 homers.