Left Field JAWS Leaders

Get Jay Jaffe's book The Cooperstown Casebook where he outlines who should and shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame based on his JAWS metric used here.

JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score system) was developed by sabermetrician Jay Jaffe as a means to measure a player's Hall of Fame worthiness. A player's JAWS is their career WAR averaged with their 7-year peak WAR. Note that only batting or pitching WAR are used in determining the averages at a given position. The current Hall of Famers are then grouped by position and a position average JAWS is computed.

For some positions, the averages are skewed due to a lack of players at that position, so overall HOF average hitters are added to that position's average until the total count of actual and average players matches that of the most inducted position (RF).

More details of JAWS can be found here.

Note that some players listed as HOFers may have been inducted for non-playing reasons.

Rankings of Negro League players should consider that Negro League data is not complete. Research is still ongoing and we’ll continue to publish updates as more information becomes available. Negro Leagues Data: Frequently Asked Questions (NEW)

HOF - Indicates Player is a Hall of Famer.
Bold - Indicates Player is not yet eligible for the Hall of Fame or was First. Not retired by 2018.