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Whether past pitchers threw any faster or slower than contemporary pitchers is irrelevant to the original question.
The simple answer is this: OOTP does not know player reputations. It works with a database that is comprised largely of statistics, and the game uses those numbers to calculate ratings according to proprietary formulas.
OOTP does not know that Walter Johnson is considered one of the hardest throwers in the early 20th century. It does not know Ty Cobb's famous comments or that it is widely believed that Johnson threw a fastball in the high 90's.
None of this information is captured in the database that OOTP uses. So it can only base theoretical velocity on statistical totals like strikeouts. Fortunately, most pitchers throughout history with high strikeout ratios have generally been hard throwers, so the correlation works well and is generally accurate in OOTP.
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