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 but the idea that i'm running under is that they are working out deals which account for this and influence salary accordingly