FRISCO -- What was painful to watch then has become a teaching point for Chi Chi Gonzalez now.

It's not just about how hard you can throw the ball in a big situation, but often how soft you can, too.

On Saturday, at the Rangers' last caravan stop of the winter, Gonzalez was relating the need for more speed variation in his pitches if he's going to hold down a spot in the rotation. As an example, he cited his last outing of 2015: Game 3 of the AL Division Series against Toronto.

For those who have blocked out everything but the wild seventh inning of Game 5, the Rangers were down 2-0 with runners on the corners when Gonzalez, designated as the club's multi-inning reliever for the postseason, entered in the sixth. He walked the bases full, then got a double play to reach the brink of a magical escape, but had to stare down Troy Tulowitzki.

Gonzalez threw six pitches in the battle, all of them changeups or sliders, with the idea of giving Tulowitzki nothing to turn on. The problem: All of them were virtually the same speed, ranging from 89.3 mph to 90.9. According to BrooksBaseball.net, the last two pitches were 89.3 and 89.6. That's ample opportunity for a hitter such as Tulowitzki to get his timing down. He hit the last one for a game-breaking -- and maybe series-changing -- three-run homer.

"Everything was the same," Gonzalez said Saturday. "When I was in the bullpen, I tended to try to throw everything hard, and that meant a lot of pitches looked exactly the same. When I started, I had better difference. I need to make my breaking ball slower."

For the full season, the variance wasn't that great, either. His fastball averaged 91.6 mph, his changeup 86.3 and his slider 86.0. He needed something slower to extend the window between his slowest stuff and hardest. Perhaps rediscovering his curveball (79.4 mph) would help, but he threw it only a handful of times in games as a starter and put it away entirely when he moved to the bullpen.

He will have the spring to work on that, but he's also got a spot in the rotation to win, which may come down to execution more than experimentation. There is a spot open at the back of the rotation, and Gonzalez would seem to be the favorite, slightly ahead of Nick Martinez and decidedly ahead of Nick Tepesch, A.J. Griffith, Anthony Ranaudo, Phil Klein and Cesar Ramos.

"I certainly don't expect anything to be given to me," Gonzalez said. "My focus, though, is going out there as a starter and pitching my butt off to win a job. Every year in my career, I feel like I've been fighting to make a certain team out of spring training. Last year, in major league camp, I approached it like that and did well. I'm going to have the same approach this year."