'No' Vote on Suzuki: 'Innocent Oversight,' or Something Else?

Ichiro Suzuki was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this week, and it was almost unanimous—save for one member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. The 51-year-old retired Mariners outfielder racked up 393 out of 394 votes Tuesday, or 99.7% of the vote, making him the first player from Japan to be elected, though he doesn't seem to be sore about the lone holdout, per the AP. "There's one writer that I wasn't able to get a vote from," he said Thursday in Cooperstown, New York. "I would like to invite him over to my house, and we'll have a drink together, and we'll have a good chat." More on the surprising development:

• Will we ever know? The New York Post wants the anonymous "nay" voter to "please stand up," but that doesn't seem likely to happen. "We don't know and we very likely won't know," Dayn Perry writes for CBS Sports, explaining that although a good number of BBWAA writers go public with their votes, it's not required.
• We should know: So says Steve Buckley for the Athletic, writing it would fun to have writers explain strategies not only on who they didn't vote for, but who they did. "These are great stories. We should be hearing more of them," he writes.

• Why the rejection? Perry has some ideas: "Perhaps it was innocent oversight. Perhaps the voter took the lazy way out, eyeballed Ichiro's great-but-not-inner-circle WAR total, ignored, oh, everything else about his case, and decided he wasn't deserving, at least of first-ballot status. Maybe it was a numbers game. Voters are not permitted to vote for more than 10 candidates in a given year and ... it's often possible to find more than 10 worthies. Perhaps the voter rightly assumed Ichiro would cruise in and spent those 10 spots on less certain hopefuls."
• All "yeas": Retired Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera is the only MLB player to ever earn that unanimous vote to get into the Hall of Fame. Another player who earned all but one vote, like Suzuki: Derek Jeter, who also never found out who the lone wolf was.
• Jeter's thoughts: The former Yankee tells Fox Digital that "I would never ... say everyone should've voted for me or everyone should have voted for Ichiro." However, "I think a lot of members of the media want athletes to be responsible and accountable; I think they should do the same thing."
• An homage: Perry must've felt bad about the one missing vote, because he's penned this homage to the "singular" Suzuki.

(More Ichiro Suzuki stories.)