Complete list of unanimous Baseball Hall of Famers: Ichiro just misses making history

The Baseball Hall of Fame announced its class of 2025 on Tuesday night, and while every player who earns enshrinement in Cooperstown has earned their place in history, not all inductees are created equal — and one of this year's candidates just barely missed one of the game's most exclusive clubs.

We've known since the moment he decided to retire that Ichiro Suzuki was bound for the Hall. A former AL MVP, 10-time All-Star, 10-time Gold Glove Award winner and three-time Silver Slugger, he's quite simply one of the greatest pure hitters baseball has ever seen; if anyone belongs in Cooperstown, it's Ichiro. But while there was very little suspense surrounding his candidacy in his first year on the ballot, he had something even more special on the line: the chance to become just the second unanimous inductee in the Hall of Fame's history.

Alas, he fell just one agonizing vote short, cruising in at 99.7 percent. It's a travesty, and it means that baseball's most exclusive fraternity will remain a party of one at least for one more year.

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How many players have been unanimously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame?

The Hall is closing in on nearly 90 years of honoring the game's greatest players. But in all that time, only one of them has managed to earn induction unanimously: New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, who earned 425 out of 425 votes on the 2019 ballot. (Many thought that his former teammate, shortstop Derek Jeter, would follow suit a year later, but he was left off of just a single ballot.)

For a long time, the idea of a unanimous inductee was viewed as almost a kind of heresy, with some voters even refusing to vote for a candidate in his first year on the ballot out of principle. It became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: If legends like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Ted Williams couldn't earn 100 percent of the vote, how could anyone else reasonably expect to?

Thankfully, that stance has softened with time, and Rivera's unimpeachable resume was enough for him to finally break through that particular glass ceiling. Now it could be Ichiro's turn, and it would put him above the biggest names to ever play the game.

Highest voting percentages in Baseball Hall of Fame history

In the history of the Hall, only 38 players have even cracked 90 percent of the vote in a given year, and only 19 have crossed the 95 percent threshold. Below are the ten highest vote percentages of all-time, featuring names like Jeter, Griffey Jr., Ripken, Cobb and Aaron.

Cobb was a part of the Hall's very first class back in 1936. Other than that, though, Aaron and Seaver are the only two inductees to crack the list prior to 1999, a sign of just how drastically voting behavior has shifted in recent years.