UPDATE ON "PITCHING TO CONTACT"
I wrote about pitching to contact yesterday (see Cincinatti's Pitching Philosophy). This one statement has brought up some questions.

"Even though the emphasis is on letting the batters put the ball into play, you can see that all the pitchers are still above the minimum of 4.5 K/9 in order that, unless you're named Mark Fidrych, is necessary to be effective."

Where did the figure 4.5 K/9 come from? I'll try to explain that right now.

This is from Bill James...

"If a pitcher's strikeout rate is less than 4.5 per
nine innings, you can pretty much write him off as
somebody who is going to have a real career."

The next part goes into a little more detail.

"Could there be an exception to the rule?...If there
were an exception to the rule it would probably be a
Kent Tekulve-type pitcher who threw underhanded or
low-sidearm and never walked anybody. Why is this
true? There are really two ways to explain it. One is
that batting average against a pitcher is inversely
related to his strikeout rate. If a pitcher's
strikeouts are low, the batting average against him
will be high.

Up to a certain point, a pitcher can contend with a
high batting average against him by doing other things
well--but only up to a point. Beyond that point, no
matter how well he does other things, he's going to
lose. That point, in modern baseball, is about 4.5
strikeouts per nine innings."

That is my bad for not explaining how I came to a conclusion, I should know better. Thanks to everybody for keeping me in check.