This offseason didn’t need extra layers of uncertainty. Teams are already navigating both a looming lockout and a very weak class of free agents, and while executives have been virtually unanimous in disclaiming anything being weird or different so far, it’s clear that those factors are going to make for an even less predictable hot stove than usual. We’re about to see some decisions that, at first, will feel inscrutable. What we’ll have to remember is that they’re products not of irrationality, exactly, but of people working hard to behave as rationally as they can in a marketplace that is hurtling toward chaos.

Into this concoction of confusion, though, there are also some other sources of major misdirection or uncertainty that have nothing to do with exactly who’s available this winter or whether a salary cap is coming on the other side of an 80-day blackout. This year, throughout the minor leagues, the run environment tilted sharply toward offense. That makes evaluating players harder, because it messes with any effort to draw real meaning from results.

“Yeah, I mean, a lot of that stuff, you try to take into account so many different things in the environment, with the ballpark, the wind, the baseball, the player, all the things that are happening, and hopefully, we can weight those appropriately,” said Brewers boss Matt Arnold, who has to keep the performance of some of his top prospects this season (Andrew Fischer’s assault on 50 homers; Braylon Payne’s power breakout; Bishop Letson’s 4.85 ERA) in perspective amid wide-swinging results. “And the environments can swing in these different places, and ballparks change. Sometimes there’s a wall built in right field, and it changed the wind coming in, or whatever that might be. Hopefully, we’re doing what we can to account for all those things.”

Everyone would rather assess process anyway, of course, but when the stat lines are all slanted, it can also slant a player’s self-perception—so even if you believe you can see past a guy’s slash line, if he can’t, he might fall into bad habits, one way or another.

“I think every team is trying to chase upstream the underlying ability that leads to performance. I think, generally speaking, teams are pretty good at it,” said Red Sox president of baseball operations Craig Breslow. “What is really, really difficult to quantify is, what is the emotional impact on the physical performance as a result of confidence being down because of, you know, a changing run environment or willingness or unwillingness to challenge in the strike zone. So there’s still a lot of evaluation we rely on scouts for, on coaches for, and trying to piece together, fill in the gaps between: What do we think this guy’s talent says he should be, and what did we actually see? And how well can we explain the gap between those two?”