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Eno Sarris, Special to ESPN.com 8y

Four pitchers who could follow Dallas Keuchel's lead and someday turn into aces

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As 2013 came to a close, Dallas Keuchel was sporting an ERA over five in over 200 major league innings. There was very little to recommend him going forward -- his velocity was middling, his strikeout rate below average, and his walk rate mediocre. An 89 mph sinker that managed to get ground balls wasn't enough, and even his spot in a bad Houston Astros rotation seemed to be at risk.

But if you knew where to look, you could see reason to hope in Keuchel's late-season resurgence. In August and September, he more than halved his home run rate while pushing his strikeout rate up. That sort of thing happens all the time in small samples, but there was a tangible change in his pitching mix that made those developments more meaningful.

You might know the story by now. Late in 2013, Keuchel had ditched his curve -- which got half the whiffs of an average curve and yielded more home runs than average -- in favor of a slider that was about seven miles per hour harder and got 40 percent more whiffs than your average slider. Since then, he's encountered only a slight hiccup as his hand got used to throwing the harder breaking ball. The rest has been gravy, to the tune of a sub-three ERA two years running, as well as some hardware this year.

As rare a breakout as it was, Keuchel's story also provides us with an easy-to-follow road map. Let's examine pitchers who changed their pitching mix drastically last year and showed interesting results.

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