GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Corey Kluber doesn’t really care what you think of the Cleveland Indians’ pitching staff heading into 2016. The 2014 AL Cy Young Award Winner, coming off a 2015 season that saw him finish with a disappointing 9-16 record despite excellent peripheral stats, told USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday that he’s not worried at all about the outside perception of his club’s rotation.

“I don’t think we’re concerned with where people rank us as a staff,” he said. “Our only goal is to go out there and win ballgames. Whether people expect that of us or not, that’s going to be our goal.”

That makes sense. Like Kluber suggested, his job is to pitch, and he’ll pitch his best regardless of how well anyone expects him to pitch. About that, though: Baseball’s most advanced projection systems are extremely bullish on the Indians in 2016. Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecasts a 93-win season for the club — the best in the American League and 11 games ahead of the second-best team in the American League Central. And Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projects Kluber and teammate Carlos Carrasco to be the fourth and sixth most valuable pitchers in the Majors, respectively, ahead of more heralded front-end pitching duos like the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester and the Mets’ Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom.

To fans in Cleveland and all those who vigilantly check preseason projections at advanced stats sites, hearing that the Indians’ pitching looks excellent might not raise many eyebrows. But the Indians finished with a pedestrian 81 wins last season, and to the majority of those who follow the sport, their rotation might represent baseball’s best-kept secret. People know Kluber, of course, from that Cy Young season. But Cleveland can boast a strong staff behind him, one that looks apt to carry the team to contention this year and beyond: Carrasco has been excellent since joining the rotation for good in late 2014, 26-year-old righty Danny Salazar enjoyed a breakout year of his own in his first full Major League season in 2015, and 25-year-old righty Trevor Bauer offers tantalizing upside with a floor as a solid but unspectacular back-end starter.

Asked how he thought his rotation stacked up to the rest of the league, manager Terry Francona resisted making bold predictions and pointed out the relatively short resumes of the pitchers on his staff.

“We really like our pitching,” he said. “The one difference, when you start talking about stacking up, the one thing they haven’t done is do it year after year after year. Kluber’s won a Cy Young, which is pretty impressive, but I don’t think you start saying things because it hasn’t happened. But that doesn’t mean we don’t really like them.”

That Kluber and Carrasco, especially, should now appear so thoroughly dominant so soon after emerging as full-time big-leaguers is part of what makes the Indians unusual. They both throw mid-90s fastballs with filthy secondary offerings, so neither looks like a pitcher who needed to figure out how to work with short stuff. But neither exactly blazed his way into the Majors at a young age.

The 29-year-old Kluber, whose Cy Young came in his first full season in a big-league rotation, joined the Indians from the Padres in the three-way deal that put Jake Westbrook on the Cardinals in 2010 and yielded a 4.69 ERA over parts of four seasons in Class AAA ball. Here’s a look at his curveball, from PitcherList.com:

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His ascendence to stardom reflects, in part, the Indians’ patience with his development. But Francona suggested the club knew it was coming.

“We try to do our best as coaches and as an organization, but the player has to do it,” Francona said. “With Corey, his work ethic is solid, and everything about him — his routines — put him in position to have success. And it didn’t really surprise us that he did so well.”

Carrasco’s rise was a bit more complicated. A key piece of the 2009 deadline deal that sent Cliff Lee to the Phillies, Carrasco joined the Indians with a big prospect pedigree but struggled in every big-league turn until 2014. Now 28, he opened the 2014 campaign in Cleveland’s rotation but struggled again, and spent much of that season working out of the bullpen and refining his mechanics. He returned to the starting staff in mid-August of that year and has pitched great ever since.

“Carrasco’s a little bit of a different story,” Francona said. “He desperately wanted to be a starter, took some steps backwards, went to the bullpen, and earned his way back into the rotation, which I think is far more meaningful than somebody handing it to you. And along with that, you’ve seen him start to understand the responsibility that comes with it. And it’s fun to watch him grow like that.

“I get asked a lot, ‘Are you being too patient sometimes?’ Maybe, but if you’re not, and you let somebody go, you’ve got a chance to miss out on somebody. The way pitching is — you’ve seen what guys are paying for it — because we were patient with Carlos, now we’ve got a starter that slots in behind Kluber that’s probably top 10 in the league, depending on what you look at. Big, strong, durable, he’s got all the pitches, he’s built for innings. There’s a lot to like about him.”

Check out Carrasco’s changeup, also from PitcherList.com:

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“I think it says something that the organization doesn’t bail on guys if things don’t go exactly how they planned,” Kluber said. “Both of us probably established ourselves at a little later age than maybe they would have liked, but I think it speaks to their patience — not just jumping ship right away.”

Salazar, at 26, now looks primed to join Kluber and Carrasco in a terrific trio at the front of Cleveland’s rotation. The hardest thrower of the group with an average fastball just shy of 95 mph, Salazar debuted in 2013 and pitched so well down the stretch that he got the start for the Indians in the Wild Card game that year. But he struggled to start the 2014 season and found himself demoted by mid May. He rejoined the rotation for good in August and enjoyed a breakout season of his own in 2015, which saw him yield a 3.45 ERA and strike out more than a batter an inning over 30 starts.

Bauer, the youngest of the group at 25, hasn’t yet seen the type of results to match the prospect reputation he owned when he joined the club in an offseason trade in December, 2012. But Bauer, despite high walk rates to date in his big-league career, maintains strong upside thanks to a fastball that has averaged 93.2 mph in his career and one of the Majors’ broadest arrays of secondary stuff. And Francona believes the patience the organization showed with Kluber and Carrasco could pay off again.

“The easy thing to do at times is to get frustrated,” Francona said. “The harder thing to do is to say,

‘OK, we certainly want to win every game we play, but we also know — if we do things right and he does things right — what could happen. So you balance that, and sometimes it’s a tough balance. I get it. But I think if you’re impatient too often, you’re going to lose out.”

Perhaps most promising of all for the Indians: Both Carrasco and Kluber are signed to team-friendly deals that could keep them in Cleveland for years to come — Carrasco until 2020, Kluber until 2021 — and both Bauer and Salazar will remain in team control through arbitration until after the 2020 season.

Baseball being baseball, it’s silly to predict dynastic success for any club, no less one coming off an 81-win season. But with a foursome of excellent or at least very promising pitchers in their rotation for the next five seasons, the future looks bright for the Indians.