There's been a lot of talk recently about the Twins going after good starting pitching and especially some hard-throwing pitching. The majority of this discussion hasn't so much centered around who they should be going after but rather how much they should be offered. I for one had little to no basis for making this judgement but was curious so I decided to conduct an investigation in hopes of finding a reasonably consistent trend which could aid in the predictions. I understand that the market will fluctuate from year to year and that inflation will occur but I believe these examples should provide at least a basis to go off of. All the data that I used to create this analysis was obtained from baseball-reference and fangraphs so thank you to those sites for making so much information readily available to curious parties

The first step I wanted to take was determining what was a "hard-throwing" pitcher. Because it sounded pretty good and rounded up to 93 I chose to take all pitchers who displayed an average fastball velocity of 92.6 over the course of a year starting in 2007 (2007 is as far back as fangraphs keeps pitch f/x data. Aside from this I also narrowed down the pitchers by requiring the following criteria:

-- still in the league (excluded Brad Penny)

-- entered the league before 2010 (greater sample size)

-- at least 2 years of this high average fastball velocity (establish consistency)

After compiling this list it was time to start considering the salary aspect. I wanted the statistic for average salary per year, but only concerning the years which a pitcher was free agent eligible. Yes, many of the pitchers in this list signed extensions