Hall Of Fame Expert Predicts Only One Player Will Make It This Year

Bill Deane is a former senior research associate at the Baseball Hall of Fame. For more than three decades, he's been predicting who'll make it into the HOF, who won't, and what their vote percentages will be. On borderline cases—those within 10 percent of the 75-percent cutoff—he's batting .806. So who does Deane predict will be making a speech at Cooperstown next summer?

Greg Maddux. And that's it.

Deane has Maddux getting in with a whopping 94 percent of the vote. But everyone else—the really awesome steroids guys, the really awesome clean guys—missing out. He's got Glavine, at 67 percent, the only player even within 10 percent of the cutoff. He predicts Frank Thomas to garner 63 percent of the vote. And then it's just a descending trail of sadness, all the way down to Mike Mussina, one of the best pitchers of his generation, barely staying on the ballot at seven percent.

Deane doesn't share his methodology, and we can't check all his past results (though he was pretty spot-on last year), so you're not obligated to respect his predictions any more than, say, your own. But this is a fairly realistic-sounding worst-case scenario for the Hall: The single most stacked ballot that's ever existed, and everyone save one comes up short. If this does come to pass, will there be anyone left who doesn't believe the system is broken?

The 2014 Hall of Fame election forecast [Baseball: Past and Present]