Will This Be The Twins' Hardest-Throwing Bullpen Ever?

According to FanGraphs, the highest average fastball velocity (combining four-seamers and two-seamers or sinkers) by Twins relievers in any season came in 2019. That’s probably no surprise to most Twins fans. That year’s staff was anchored by May, Taylor Rogers, and Tyler Duffey, but only had soft-tossing Sergio Romo for half the year, and didn’t have the aging Tyler Clippard at all. Even fringe relievers on that 2019 team (like Austin Adams, Matt Magill, Fernando Romero and Sean Poppen) routinely topped 95 miles per hour. Overall, that unit averaged 93.3 miles per hour with their heat.

I used Baseball Prospectus’s Depth Charts, which divvy up the projected relief innings to the team by percentages of the total workload, to assign weights to the contributions of each likely Twins reliever to the team’s 2021 average velocity. That system currently has 14 pitchers in line to get at least some relief innings, and while it’s likely that that number will end up even higher, that makes for a pretty robust estimate of the likely distribution of work.

Alex Colomé, Rogers, Duffey, Jorge Alcalá, and Hansel Robles each project to get 10 percent of the total relief work for the team over the course of the season. That’s a typical way to project reliever usage, though in reality, any set of five relievers is likely to see at least one case of severe attrition, be it due to injury or poor performance. Caleb Thielbar, Cody Stashak, Ian Gibaut, Lewis Thorpe, and Devin Smeltzer are each projected for at least 6 percent of the relief innings, but no more than 9 percent. Edwar Colina, Shaun Anderson, Dakota Chalmers, and Ian Hamilton are projected to play small roles.

In Baseball Prospectus 2021, the annual publication, each of these players (save Gibaut and Colina, who don’t have entries, and Chalmers, who has yet to pitch in the big leagues) have listed PECOTA projections for their 2021 fastball velocities. For those 11 pitchers, therefore, I used the projected velocity figure in the book. For Gibaut and Colina, I used the average velocities they’ve each shown in their brief big-league careers. For Chalmers, I used 94.5 miles per hour, toward the low end of reported velocity ranges listed on his most recent scouting reports.

The results: this year’s Twins project to have an average bullpen fastball velocity of 95.3 miles per hour. That would rival the 2017 and 2018 Yankees, who sported the hardest average fastballs on record. Alcalá is the projected leader, north of 99 miles per hour, but the power of even their veteran arms sets this team apart from most.

Obviously, many things could happen to prevent this projection from coming to fruition. Robles has been sitting in the 94-96 range this spring; he’s projected to better approximate his career averages and average 98 mph. Smeltzer, Thorpe, and Randy Dobnak (currently projected solely as a starter by BP) could end up eating far more relief innings than expected, for reasons good or bad. That’s to say nothing of the chances that one of the team’s harder throwers gets hurt.

Consider, though, that this assumes Jhoan Duran appears only as a starter, if at all, in the majors. It doesn’t include any projected work for Glenn Sparkman, whose fastball hums in at around 95 miles per hour. It could be that, if one of those two were pressed into service in the place of someone like Stashak or Smeltzer, the Twins will even top this sizzling projection.

As last year’s very stout bullpen proved, speed isn’t everything. In fact, some of the team’s most effective pitchers will be using their fastballs relatively sparingly, preferring to attack primarily with breaking stuff. That’s the formula the team has followed over the last two successful seasons. However, it’s exciting to imagine that even letting one of the game’s hardest throwers leave via free agency might not stop this team from being one of the most intimidating relief units in baseball history.

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