Baseball's Best (and Worst) 2023 Yearbook - the print companion to an online newsletter of the same name - looks both to the past and to the future.
The book contains a vast range of statistics from the 2022 major-league season, many of which can't be found anywhere else. It also offers predictions for 2023, based on a unique system that compares current clubs to past teams with similar qualities.
Among the book's features are exclusive five-star ratings of all 30 big-league clubs for 11 different attributes, ranging from run production and contact hitting to run prevention and strikeout pitching; rankings of the best (and worst) individual performances in dozens of categories; and separate 10-page statistical profiles of all 30 teams (comprising 25 tables and four graphs for each club).
Author G. Scott Thomas has been writing his twice-weekly newsletter, Baseball's Best (and Worst), since 2020. This is his 16th book - and his fifth about baseball.
Facts and Figures From Baseball's Best (and Worst) 2023 Yearbook
- Aaron Judge topped the American League in overall base value in 2022, and Paul Goldschmidt did the same in the National League. OBV, a stat found only in this book, is a comprehensive measure of a player's total performance. Judge and Goldschmidt rightly won the Most Valuable Player Awards in their respective leagues.
- If there were such a thing as a Least Valuable Player Award, the top candidates last season (based on OBV) would have been Jonathan Schoop in the American League and Patrick Corbin in the National League.
- The Houston Astros not only were baseball's best team in 2022, but they also established themselves as the 10th-best club since 1961, according to the book's exclusive rankings.
- Four of 2022's teams ranked among the bottom 10 percent of the 1,656 clubs that competed at the big-league level during the past 62 seasons. Last year's laggards were the Pittsburgh Pirates (who outperformed only 10.0 percent of all 1961-2022 teams), Kansas City Royals (9.6 percent), Washington Nationals (4.5 percent), and Oakland Athletics (4.0 percent).
- The Atlanta Braves led all clubs in power hitting in 2022, while the Cleveland Guardians were No. 1 in contact hitting, according to the book's ratings of team batting.
- The New York Mets were first in strikeout pitching, and the Tampa Bay Rays were the best at control pitching, based on the book's team ratings for pitchers.
- Luis Arraez and Jeff McNeil posted the best contact rates in the two leagues last season, which means that they struck out less frequently than all other hitters. Arraez also won the AL's batting title, and McNeil earned the same honor in the NL.
- Justin Verlander allowed 43 fewer earned runs than the typical pitcher would have surrendered under the same circumstances, the best performance in the American League. Sandy Alcantara matched Verlander's 43-run feat in the National League. The two pitchers won the Cy Young Awards for their leagues.
- The Colorado Rockies were backed by baseball's most dedicated fans in 2022, based on the book's analysis of attendance trends. Two teams tied for last place in the rankings of fan support: Tampa Bay and Oakland.
