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