To no one's surprise, Ichiro Suzuki is a Baseball Hall of Famer. Also to no one's surprise, he had the most on-brand reaction to this legacy-defining development. On Thursday, the Seattle Mariners released a video of Ichiro receiving the phone call with the news

BBWAA voters are a small group with a very big responsibility. We should be willing to talk about it. Or write about it. It’s what we do.

Of course I voted for Ichiro Suzuki - along with the other no-brainers on the ballot, including CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner. Pity that Carlos Beltran came up short again, and that Andruw Jones is still stuck in no man’s land.

Ichiro received 99.7 percent of the vote to earn election to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. The M's released the video of what the call from the Hall of Fame sounded late.

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.

If that remains the case when the final results are released by the Baseball Writers Association of America on Tuesday, Ichiro will be the first Japanese-born player in the Hall of Fame and just the second player ever to be unanimously elected to Cooperstown.