Are King Félix, Ichiro next in line for Hall calls?

This story was excerpted from Daniel Kramer's Mariners Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

SEATTLE -- Adrián Beltré got the coveted call from the National Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this week and joined fellow electee Joe Mauer among just 60 players to be elected in their first year of eligibility.

• Complete 2024 Hall of Fame voting results

That finite group among the 346 total Hall of Famers is all but guaranteed to grow next year when Ichiro Suzuki makes his debut on the ballot. Joining him will be Félix Hernández, who during his peak was on a clear path to Cooperstown but whose precipitous decline makes his case far more complicated.

They’ll look to join just seven former Mariners players to be elected: Beltré (2024), Edgar Martinez (2019), Ken Griffey Jr. (2016), Randy Johnson (2015), Rickey Henderson (2009), Goose Gossage (2008) and Gaylord Perry (1991).

Players must play at least 10 years and be five years removed from their final season to be eligible. Each year, a committee from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America selects a group within this criteria to be added to the ballot, alongside holdovers from the previous year who earned the necessary 5% support to stay on but not the 75% required for election.

For Suzuki, it’s not a matter of if he’ll be elected or even if he’ll be first-ballot -- but rather, if he’ll join Mariano Rivera as the only first-year eligible players to be unanimously elected. Among HOFers who were Mariners, Suzuki falls into the bracket of Griffey, who was on 437 of 440 ballots cast in 2016.

For Hernández, a six-time All-Star who never reached the postseason, it could be the first of many years where debate over his candidacy rages on. Though they’re completely different players with far different circumstances affecting their Hall status, it wouldn’t be shocking to see Hernández lurk on the ballot for years the way Martinez did before being elected in his final year of eligibility.

ICHIRO

It’s worth a reminder that the only reason Suzuki isn’t being celebrated this year is due to two games he played to begin the 2019 season with the Mariners -- the epic farewell tour in Tokyo, after which he announced his retirement at age 45.

A 10-time All-Star, Suzuki led the Majors in hits seven times en route to becoming one of just 33 players in the illustrious 3,000 hits club, the members of which are nearly all in Cooperstown. He finished his career with 3,089 after racking up 1,278 over a seven-year career in Japan. Suzuki is also among just 16 players to win 10 or more Gold Glove Awards (Griffey is also in this group).

Suzuki, who turned 50 in October, trailblazed the path for Japanese position players when he arrived in 2001 and remains among the greatest Asian stars to play in America, well before Shohei Ohtani transcended the sport.

“I really came over to the States thinking that there's really no place for me to go back to,” Suzuki told MLB.com last summer. “I took it as, 'Well, I'm the first position player from Japan.' I felt like I really carried that on my shoulders. Like, people are going to judge the position players of Japan from the performance that I have here in MLB. And so I really took that to heart. I just wanted to make sure that, of course, failure was not an option. But even if I just had OK numbers, that wasn't good enough.”

F?LIX

Hernández’s complicated case will necessitate him reaching the 5% threshold in his first year, otherwise he could see a path parallel to Johan Santana, who like “The King” was on top of the world -- with two Cy Young Awards and a Triple Crown for the Twins -- but whose peak was perhaps shorter lived.

In his prime, Hernández was among the best pitchers of his generation for a decade. From 2006-15, Hernández led all MLB pitchers with 2,065 strikeouts, 2,178 innings pitched and 50.1 wins above replacement, per FanGraphs.

But his final years in Seattle were blemished by inconsistencies, a brief transition to the bullpen when the team was contending in 2018 and up-and-down performance during an injury-plagued '19, when the Mariners began their rebuild. The then-33-year-old Hernández went 1-8 with a 6.40 ERA in 15 starts in his final year.

After he and the organization rebridged their relationship, Hernández returned to Seattle, threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the 2022 postseason and was enshrined as the 11th member of the team's Hall of Fame last summer.