Pitching aficionados will constantly advocate that movement and location are more valuable tools than velocity. Yet, in a few weeks, teams in the draft will gravitate to those who light up a radar gun over those who display craft.
The theories are: 1) you can teach the hard thrower craft easier than you can add heat to a fastball and 2) few in the drafting apparatus get fired for favoring something as overt as big velocity.
I bring this up because it seems hitters — at their Darwinian best — have evolved over the past few years to better handle the ever-increasing velocity, and that pitchers who can pitch, of all things, now have an advantage.