CC Sabathia is heading to Cooperstown...and former Yankees teammate Mariano Rivera remains the lone unanimous selection.
Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki, and Billy Wagner were all officially minted as Hall of Famers on Tuesday night, with Suzuki falling just one vote shy of a unanimous nod. CC and Ichiro were both in their first year of eligibility while Wagner was in his 10th and final, so it's an all-New York affair with a new and old flair.
Sabathia earned 342 votes (86.8 percent) thanks to a sparkling big-league career that included 251 wins, a 3.74 ERA, 3,093 strikeouts, and a Cy Young award with Cleveland in 2007. He is third all-time among lefties in strikeouts behind fellow enshrinees Randy Johnson and Steve Carlton.
The southpaw pitched for the Yanks for 11 seasons, leading the league in wins in his first two seasons in pinstripes while earning three straight All-Star nods from 2010 to 2012. His debut season in 2009 couldn’t have gone much better, posting a 3.37 ERA in 34 starts before earning the ALCS MVP and leading the Yankees to their first World Series title in nine years. The championship justified the Yankees’ offseason spending spree, which included signing Sabathia to an eight-year, $180 million contract.
The big lefty battled injuries as he aged, but he reinvented himself in the final years of his career, posting a 14-5 record in 2017 and helping the Yanks make a surprising run to game seven of the ALCS.
Ichiro will forever be mononymous, and nearly became unanimous, but fell one vote shy to join Derek Jeter in looking up at Mariano Rivera on that mantle. Suzuki, who played parts of three seasons in New York from 2012 to 2014, finished his 19-year career with 3,089 hits, 10 Gold Gloves, a Rookie of the Year and MVP award in the same season, two batting titles, three Silver Sluggers, and 10 All-Star selections.
One of the brightest big-league stars to ever come from Japan, Ichiro led the league in hits seven times, including five straight from 2006 to 2010 when he was in his prime with the Mariners, and he is now the first Japanese-born player in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Wagner played 16 seasons with the Astros, Phillies, Mets, Red Sox and Braves, posting a 47-40 record with 422 saves, the eighth-highest career total in history and the second highest among left-handers. He had 101 of those saves in three-plus seasons with the Mets, along with a 2.37 ERA.
Among Hall-worthy stats, Wagner’s 2.31 career ERA is the lowest among retired left-handed pitchers with at least 500 innings pitched in the live-ball era (post-1920), and his career 0.998 WHIP is the lowest among all retired relievers with at least 700 innings pitched.
Carlos Beltran received 70.3 percent of the vote in his second year of eligibility, boding well for his future enshrinement, and fellow former Yankee Andruw Jones (66.2 percent in his eighth year) was the only other player with at least 40 percent.