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Moyer would put a near-sneer on and say something like "It's about pitching, not throwing hard.  Even I could hop another five miles an hour onto my fastball if I wanted to, but my control would fall off too much."  Washburn said (I think when Felix was first up?) something like "He's definitely got better stuff than I do.  So what?" followed by some sort of competitive comment.
I think the guys with lesser stuff honestly do, ALL of them have significantly tougher characters.  Throughout Washburn's career, majors and minors, he's been on teams with guys who can throw 95+.  But he kept grinding his way past their dessicated carcasses with basically nothing but toughness and grit (evidence by his stony lack-of-reaction to a mistake getting hammered, returning to the original gameplan without so much as a pause).
I play lots of video games.  LOTS.  Some of my favorites are combat sports games like boxing and MMA, others are football and baseball.  When I make a mistake, or when my opponent happens to get through to me in any of them, the catcalls always begin from the couch behind me with stuff like "You'd better switch your gameplan!"  I just smile, set my jaw, and go back to exactly what I was doing before.  More often than not, I'm rewarded with not only a victory, but black feathers surrounding the dinner plates of my onlookers.  I think it takes a different, not necessarily superior, attitude and mentality to be *able* to do that, let alone to think it's the best way to go.