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Michael Hoban, mathematician and Professor Emeritus City
University of New York, created a Hall Of Fame gauge using Bill James'
Win Shares system. Bill James devised Win Shares to reduce a player’s
statistics to a single number related to the number of wins he contributed to
his team. It includes offensive, pitching and defensive accomplishments. The
quality of the team does not affect an individual player’s Win Shares. A great
player on a bad team will rate as well as a great player on a good team. Put as
simply as possible, here is what the Win Shares system does - it tells us how
good a season a player had.
Hoban's CAWS (Career Assessment/Win Shares) system suggests that a better
(and fairer) way to judge a player’s career is to combine the win shares from a
player’s ten best seasons plus an appropriate amount of credit for the player’s
longevity. The Win Shares system tells us which players had THE BEST
SEASONS; the CAWS gauge helps us to understand which players had THE BEST
CAREERS, hence whose on field achievements merit consideration for induction
into the Hall-Of-Fame.
The formula for CAWS is: CV (sum of win shares for a player's ten best seasons
- core value) plus 1/4 of the sum of the win shares for those seasons not in the
best ten (i.e. credit for longevity). Professor Hoban then made a positional
adjustment and the catcher's benchmark is 250, {Click to learn more about
Hoban's CAWS}
The following tables list catchers with: (a) The Top 50 CAWS for backstops with
800 (or more) games caught AND 10 (or more) years of service [HOF criteria] {Bold face are enshrined in the
Hall-Of-Fame and green should be in the HOF.} ; and (b) The Top 25 currently active catchers.
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