NEW YORK — In Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner, the Baseball Writers Association delivered quite an eclectic trifecta to Cooperstown on Tuesday.

The first Japanese player ever elected to the Hall of Fame, a reformed alcoholic, and an under-sized, under-rated strikeout artist from rural Virginia who finally made it in his last year on the ballot.

Undoubtedly, the main attraction at Cooperstown next July will be Ichiro, who missed by one vote of equaling Mariano Rivera’s perfection in 2017. He’s expected to draw record crowds from Japan, where he hit .353 in nine seasons before defecting to the U.S. with the Mariners in 2001 — and going on to hit .311 with 3,089 hits and 509 stolen bases for 19 seasons. In 2001 he became only the second player in history to win Rookie of the Year and MVP honors in the same season and three years later he broke Hall-of-Famer George Sisler’s long-standing all-time one-season hits record of 257 with 262.

But there also figures to be a good number of Yankee and Met fans making the trek to upstate New York to pay homage to Sabathia, the bulwark pitching ace of the Yankees’ last World Series team in 2009 with the most strikeouts (3,089) of any lefthander in history who was also on the ballot for the first time and got 86.8% — and the likewise popular Wagner, a two-time All-Star with the Mets whose 413 saves rank sixth all-time, who made it in with 82.5%. In addition, his a 2.31 ERA is the second lowest in the modern era for pitchers with 900 or more innings, behind only Rivera’s 2.21.

“Mariano screwed it up for everybody,” Wagner joked last year when he missed election by five votes with 73.8%.

Full disclosure here: This was the first time I voted for Wagner, the 5-10 lefty and pride of Marion, Va., and very possibly it was because I was spoiled covering Rivera’s entire monumental career of sheer dominance. I have always been a “small ballot” voter, rarely voting for more than three candidates, and with Wagner, I could never seem to get past his postseason record — a 10.03 ERA, with 21 hits and three homers in 11/2 innings for four different teams.

But as the years went on and Wagner began edging closer to the necessary 75% for election, nuggets of his dominance — my No. 1 criteria — began to emerge. He averaged 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings and held opponents to a .187 average for his career and both are all time records. And though this is not part of Wagner’s statistical record (but is part of the Hall-of-Fame’s “sportsmanship/integrity” clause), he has always been a class act, always at his locker to face the media in good times and bad, and that always counted big with me.

In contrast to Wagner, there was never any doubt about Ichiro in his first year on the ballot, only whether he would be the second player ever to be elected unanimously. “He should have been,” said Lou Piniella, Ichiro’s first manager with the Mariners. “He was a totally different player from the other Hall-of-Famers [Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez] I had in Seattle in that he was a leadoff hitter. But he was the best leadoff hitter of his time, and a great teammate.

“My only concern about him that first spring training with us was that he kept taking every pitch the opposite way and I was afraid he couldn’t hit a major league fastball. So I told his interpreter to tell him I’d like to see him pull the ball. He nodded and smiled. When he came to bat two innings later he pulled the first pitch over the right-center field scoreboard and as he came into the dugout he said: ‘That okay, Skipper?’ I said: ‘Yeah. That’s okay. From now on do whatever you want!’ The fact was, he could hit a ball as far as anyone but he believed his job was to get on base and create runs and nobody did that better.”

Sabathia was not the clear “no-brainer” first-ballot candidate as Ichiro, if only because, after being a dominant No. 1 pitcher for 12 years, winning 15 or more games eight times and a Cy Young Award with the Indians in 2007, he struggled his last six years after revealing on the eve of the Yankees’ postseason in 2015 he was battling alcoholism. A primary theme in his 2021 autobiography “Til the End” was that his greatest victory was overcoming alcoholism.

For Carlos Beltran, who finished fourth in the balloting, the consolation is that the Baseball Writers appear to be forgiving him for his part in the 2017 Astros cheating scandal, increasing his percentage from 51.1% last year to the doorstep at 70.3%. With no sure-shot candidates coming on the ballot, he’ll almost surely be elected next year.

____