If you focus on his age and overall production so far, the reported near-$100 million that the Red Sox are handing Pablo Sandoval for his next five years are reasonable. He’s a young man with an established bat at a scarce position. But if you focus instead on some of the aspects of his production, things look a little different. They look a little scarier.

First, read Dave Cameron on why even a sixth year wouldn’t have been crazy, given the right salary numbers. Basically, as the number of years go up, average annual value goes down. The sixth year might be the premium that gets the signature, but it’s not a sixth year at the same price as year one. Given that the salary pretty much exactly follows the breakdown that Cameron showed, this isn’t a terrible contract if you call Pablo Sandoval a 3.5-win 28-year-old third baseman. Even if it’s a little more than the median five-year $80 million contract the crowd wanted to give him.

But what if you call him other things?

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Kole Calhoun tore his way through the minor leagues. He hit the ground running in his 2013 debut. Why was there any surprise when he put up a top-ten season for an American League outfielder this year?

There are reasons, or maybe we could say excuses, for Calhoun’s dismissal as a prospect. He never made a top 100 Baseball America list, he never made that organization’s top 10 prospects on the Angels, and there wasn’t much buzz about him coming up. He’s not tall — at five foot ten — and his Baseball America writeup said his tools were “uninspiring.”

And once he started putting up minor league stats, there were reasons to dismiss those as well. Calhoun signed as 22 year old out of college. He was a year older than the average player in rookie ball, so maybe that helped with the .292/.411/.505 slash line at Orem. He was older than average in A-ball, so maybe we shouldn’t gaze too longingly at that .324/.410/.547 line in Inland Empire. And Triple-A? That was Salt Lake in the Pacific Coast League. Obviously his .298/.367/.507 there was inflated.

So there were reasons, or maybe excuses. But after Calhoun debuted in 2013 with offense that was 27% better than league average, he faced a new struggle last season. “Obviously they’re going to have a lot more information on me now then they’ve had in the past,” the player admitted in late 2014. “It’s my job to understand what they are trying to do and know what my weaknesses are and not really give them too much of a chance to expose them.”

It was nice that you were as good as your numbers promised, kid, but can you keep it up when they’ve got a book on you?

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The title of this post presupposes a few things — that new Brave Shelby Miller is broken; that Shelby Miller can be fixed; that Shelby Miller has not yet been fixed; that some teams are more likely than others to fix certain problems. We’re not going to leave those presuppositions aside, though. Let’s instead tackle them, one by one.

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At first glance, it seems crazy. A bad-body post-peak designated hitter that was under replacement last year… three years? $30 million? Billy Butler to the Athletics? A team that has never had three ten million dollar players on the roster at one time did so for the first time in order to sign a guy that might not play the field?

What if it wasn’t so crazy.

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You might think the rarest pitch in the game is the knuckleball — only two pitchers regularly throw it right now. But there is a pitch that only Brad Ziegler throws often.

Ziegler throws a changeup — out of a submarine arm slot. Nobody else throws the same pitch with the same mechanics.

Only six sidearmers threw at least 25 changeups last year, and if you up that number to 100 thrown, there’s only Ziegler and (lefty) Aaron Loup on the list. If you limit the list to just submariners, Ziegler’s the only one that throws a changeup regularly.

Turns out, the physics of throwing a ball from that angle could be the reason so few sidearmers boast a solid changepiece.

Take Ziegler’s slider as an example. Back when he threw overhand, before 2007, he was putting traditional slider spin on the ball from his old arm slot. Thanks to Matt Lentzner at The Hardball Times, we know what that slider spin looks like. From his piece, here are the spins on the ball on pitches leaving from your traditional three-quarter arm slots:

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It’s easy to see that baseball has changed over the last couple of decades. Walks, strikeouts, homers, and stolen bases have all seen their ups and downs, and we’re currently experiencing a valley in terms of offense. Games are longer. There’s instant replay.

But there’s evidence that players are getting similarly better and worse at these things — the distribution hasn’t changed, the graph has just been shifted. It’s possible that the relative value of certain events in baseball as a whole could still be about the same. A stolen base’s relationship to a win could be unchanged if the distribution of stolen bases is similar, and there are just fewer of them.

Is that what you find when you look back empirically? If you relate strikeouts, walks, stolen bases, and home runs to winning, is that relationship steady over these turbulent times?

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Are foul balls a skill? Do they lead to better outcomes? Should all hitters have a two-strike approach?

These are the kinds of things (among others) that Sam Fuld has been thinking about in the outfield.

Let’s try to answer some of those questions the best we can.

If fouling a ball off was an easily measured skill — if percentage of balls fouled was a good measure of that skill at least — then you’d expect the skill to show through most years. Strikeout rate, for example, is fairly decent at measuring your ability to make contact. Strikeout rate stays fairly stable — you could use shorthand to say that almost 90% of your strikeout rate next year is described by your strikeout this year.

Foul percentage doesn’t work that way. Your foul percentage this year describes about 40% of the variance in your foul percentage next year. That makes foul percentage more unstable than batting average, batting average on balls in play, or your rate of doubles per plate appearance. Brian Roberts was 11th in baseball foul percentage this year, he was barely above average in 2013. So it goes.

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