I'm sure everyone has a story like this. I apologize if it's a little sappy, but please stick with me, even if just for the bad puns ("sappy," "stick with me," lol) or the (spoiler!) Freddy Galvis awesomeness report.

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I'm very new to the world of sabermetrics. By "very new," I mean I just suddenly understood the concept of DiPS today, after reading it here multiple times and having my eyes glaze over. This excites me. I'm still not completely sure if I "get" it 100%, but at least I can follow the concept. So please be patient with me and forgive me if this is a completely idiotic question.

Anyways. I understand the idea behind using defense-independent stats for pitchers, since a pitcher can't really control what turns out to be a hit and what doesn't. But is it generally true that a pitcher can control how hard a pitch is hit or whether it's on the ground or in the air? If so, is there any stat out there that accounts for the quality of a ball put in play? Like a formula that considers BABIP or some fielding independent stat plus LD%, GB%, and FB% to account for the types of batted balls he allows? I realize it can be looked at separately and can give you a pretty good idea of what's going on. But is there a formula out there that puts it all together? If not, what are the league averages for all those numbers?

Related possibly-idiotic question: say a guy has been crazy lucky/unlucky. Is there a stat that predicts what his ERA will look like once his BABIP and other periferals normalize?

Again, thanks in advance for your help and patience.

P.S. Does anyone in the fantasy league want to trade for Alexi Ogando? :-D
/hopeful face'd

[Note: This originally started as a reply to an individual commenter, who had responded to a well-written stats-based article with “why can’t we just talk about sports without bringing numbers into it,” or something in that neighborhood. My reply quickly got too long to read as a comment, so I chose to FanPost it instead.]

Let me preface this by saying that I hate math, or I guess more accurately, math hates me. I understand maybe- maybe- 10% of the stats-based conversations that happen here. Parabolas and bell curves and “find the value for x” cause my brain and intestinal tract to hemorrhage simultaneously. In high school, I only kept my TI-89 around because it had that Snake game on it, and in college I took geometry as my required math course because as an art major, I like shapes and was hoping to get to show off my lovely 48-piece Prismacolor set (I wasn’t disappointed).

In fact, there are few things out there that I dislike as much as or more than cold and bloodless numbers. I made a graph:

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