In baseball, great players get elected into a Hall of Fame.  To get elected, a player must receive at least 75 percent of the vote among the baseball writers.  If they don’t get 75% of the vote, they are eligible for election for the following year.  Generally, the pattern is that the voting percent for a particular player increases over time and the hope is eventually that he will get over 75% of the vote and be elected to the HOF.

I recently saw the following graph that shows the voting pattern for many players over time.  I’ve pasted the graph below; the original article and graph can be found here.

Each line trajectory corresponds to the voting pattern for a particular player. The yellow dots below the horizontal line correspond to the first year the player is eligible to be voted in, and the yellow dots above the horizontal line correspond to players inducted in the HOF.

What is interesting to me is that the slopes of the HOF trajectories seem pretty similar across players.  I would suspect that one could make a reasonable prediction of a player’s chance of getting inducted in the HOF based on his initial voting percentage.