Ichiro Suzuki is all about baseball, but he's much more than that in Japan. Back home, he's a wellspring of national pride, much like Shohei Ohtani now. His triumphs across the Pacific buoyed the nation as Japan's economy sputtered through the so-called lost decades of the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Ichiro Suzuki has become the first Japanese player to make it to baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is likely to be the next.

Ichiro, who rose to global superstardom with the Seattle Mariners, was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot, but fell one vote short of becoming the second player voted in unanimously. Former New York Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera became the first player voted in unanimously in 2019.