[Pelican]

The OP summary captures how I generally understood the hitter and pitcher ratings played off each other. I play a lot of historical sims, and the Deadball Era provides a kind of test of this theory, with high Contact and low strike out totals for hitters, and pitchers with tame stuff by today's standards, but all sorts of movement from spitballs and lots of knuckleballs. The results I am seeing are about what one would expect from that era. Of course, the incredible durability of starting pitchers changes the game significantly.