Take a moment to think about who you expect the best pitchers in baseball to be in 2015 and you'll have some obvious names, guys like Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez and Max Scherzer, aces who have been stars for years. But you also might include Garrett Richards, Jake Arrieta, Corey Kluber and Dallas Keuchel on that list, because all four are coming off very successful seasons, and you'd realize that you almost certainly wouldn't have considered them before 2014. They've had some success, maybe, but they'd need to take big and unexpected leaps forward to be included in a conversation.
When we look back on 2015's best pitchers, we'll probably still be talking about Kershaw and Hernandez. But we'll also be talking about pitchers who didn't quite fit that description back in the first week of February, guys primed to take that next big step. We'll look at three today, noting here that while Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar deserve to be included, we already looked at the Indians' rotation back in December. Instead, here are three others with a great chance to be looked at very differently come the winter of 2015-16.
