This story was excerpted from Do-Hyoung Park’s Twins Beat newsletter, written this week by Paul Casella. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

The deadline for casting Hall of Fame ballots has come and gone, though it will still be a couple of weeks until the results are announced.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t check in to see where Joe Mauer stands in his bid to become a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

While many expect Mauer to ultimately be enshrined in Cooperstown, it's far from a sure thing that he will earn induction in his first year of eligibility. Yet as of Saturday night, he was tracking at 82.1% of the known votes, courtesy of Ryan Thibodaux and Co.’s Hall of Fame ballot tracker.

That puts Mauer well above the 75% threshold needed for Hall of Fame induction, though only 32% of the estimated ballots have been revealed publicly. While more ballots figure to trickle out in the coming days, the official Hall of Fame announcement will be made live on MLB Network at 6 p.m. ET on Jan. 23.

With an expected total of 384 ballots, Mauer would need to be listed on approximately 72% of the remaining ballots to stay above 75% overall. And since this is Mauer's first time on the ballot, there’s no use in predicting what the remaining voters might do given that there's no track record from last year. That said, Jason Sardell -- whose Hall of Fame forecasts have proven to be rather accurate in the past -- recently projected that Mauer will finish around 80%.

Historically, voters who do not reveal their ballot ahead of the announcement tend to be a bit stricter with their selections than the ones who reveal their ballots in advance. That means a player's actual voting percentage usually ends up being slightly lower than the percentage in the tracker.

For example, Scott Rolen -- the lone inductee by the BBWAA in 2023 -- was tracking at 80.4% of the vote heading into the announcement ... and finished with 76.3%. As for the near-misses last year, Todd Helton was tracking at 74.5% and finished with 72.2%, while Billy Wagner was sitting at 71.3% and ultimately checked in at 68.1%.

But with Mauer continuing to hover above 80%, he’s certainly trending in the right direction in his bid to become a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Adrián Beltré (98.4%) is in even better shape to be a first-ballot selection, while Helton (82.1%), Wagner (80.5%) and Gary Sheffield (75.6%) are also tracking above 75% at the moment.