At a Hall of Fame news conference, Ichiro joined the ranks of many people around the globe in wondering why he didn’t get that one vote.

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.