Watching Dallas Keuchel, a Fuzzier, Slower Clayton Kershaw

Like so many baseball upstarts, the Astros were built by way of prospect-hoarding and inefficiency—exploitation and a couple seasons of sheer willed suckitude; unlike most of those teams, they are very much in a pennant race. As an unavoidable result of the process through which they came to be, their players are connected to one another less by stylistic ideology than by proximity on the spectra of ability and attainability. They are variations on the theme of budding talent, or the ones that were available.

Jose Altuve, a stumpy lifetime long shot turned batting champion, turns double plays with 20-year-old rookie shortstop Carlos Correa, a former first overall pick who at every point of his developmental curve has done exactly what was hoped for. Colby Rasmus, a source of hope and frustration at every stop of his career to this point, is having his best season since Tony La Russa booted him out of St. Louis a half decade ago. Evan Gattis arrived via Atlanta, via Venezuelan winter ball, via a janitorial gig. This is an overdetermined movie script that became an overachieving baseball team.

While Houston presently has just about every iteration of ascendant ballplayer, the one sitting closest to that nexus might be their most valuable asset. Dallas Keuchel, the team's left-handed ace, is, at age 27, young but not prodigiously so, and gifted but not instantaneously mind-boggling. He is also making a strong case to be the American League Cy Young winner, just as the Astros are emerging as something like a contender.

If you watch Keuchel pitch, which you should, the first thing you will notice is his beard. This is not your fault. The beard is long and hideous. It would look equally at home in a Rembrandt portrait, on the face of a wan and ponderous clergyman, as it would hanging from an uncleaned gutter in late fall or early winter, after some early snow has combined with packed leaves to form a pulpy composite clot.

Such facial foliage is found on a great many indistinct, indistinguishable middle relievers across baseball, who all throw the same hard but erratic fastball and spin the same spasmodic slider. The beard, amid baseball's present surplus of like arms, suggests that Keuchel is the starter version of those artless, overscruffed bullpen men, but stick it out for a couple moments and you will discover more finery than you bargained for. Dallas Keuchel is different.

In the immediate company of baseball's finest pitchers, Keuchel can underwhelm. As the starter for the American League side at the All-Star game in Cincinnati, he was surrounded by arms pulled straight from baseball concept sketches. Felix Hernandez relieved Keuchel in the third and lobbed in magnetized curveballs; David Price, who throws 94 while yawning, entered in the fourth. By the game's midpoint, Keuchel's competent pair of early innings—one unearned run, one K, a sprinkling of ground-ball outs—was forgotten, and his repertoire seemed obsolete.

Keuchel is a sinkerballer, a phylum of pitchers whose talents tend to last but not to dazzle. At its zippiest, Keuchel's fastball will hit 92; it is most effective a notch slower than that, cruising toward the plate at 89 or 90 and dropping a baseball's height in the final frame. He also uses a fine, sweeping slider and a downy change. This is not pyrotechnic stuff, not any of it.

This M.O., maximized, has historically served as the foundation of decade-spanning careers that reach the lower tiers of excellence. Think of Tim Hudson, the current dean of sinkerballers, who is now pitching his final season at age 40. Hudson spent almost two decades atop some very good pitching staffs and, as his skills eroded, settled helpfully into the middle of others. His career represents something of a best-case scenario; the fickle luck of Rick Porcello or Justin Masterson is more common for this sort of pitcher.

Keuchel's present success, then, is both a continuation and an expansion of the genre. He has the tics and tempo of his forebears. There's the familiar watchful windup, like he's searching for a clue regarding the batter's strategy and intention right up until moment the pitch leaves the fingertips; the same squared-up follow-through; and the readiness to help his own cause as a fielder. (Keuchel won a Gold Glove last year.) He works quickly, keeping his defense engaged, and exactly, hitting his spots as if simply sliding a cored ball along a wire connecting his hand to the catcher's mitt.

The central joy of watching a master sinkerballer is in the plainness of the allegory. He gets by on parlor tricks while his peers practice high science. He is a lint-pocketed gambler in a billionaire's casino. Each loping fastball that prompts a home-run swing but produces, by some miracle of minute degree, a ground out to third seems a triumph of an old, pre-digital knack, a tally for feel in an age increasingly ruled by formula.

Keuchel does a bit more than carry on the tradition of a particular baseball nuance, though. On the last night of June, the Astros hosted the Kansas City Royals, one of the best offensive teams in the league. Five days after pitching a complete-game shutout against the Yankees, Keuchel brusquely breezed through eight scoreless innings. The Royals, accustomed to shooting line drives to every corner of the field, simply tapped and nubbed the ball around the infield. Fastballs caught corners or changeups fell just off them; bats scraped the tops of these pitches and were deposited in the grass while their owners commenced unhappy jogs to first.

Against Royals left fielder Alex Gordon, Keuchel showed how he has attained the type of success ordinarily off limits to his ilk. Gordon faced him three times, each ending in a strikeout. That cognizant fastball, not content here with merely hoping for meek contact, scrambled Gordon's radar early in counts, catching the plate when he held his swing and ducking off when he let loose. The off-speed offerings coaxed the final airy hacks in each at-bat. In these instances, Keuchel tied his traditional talents to some selective version of the strikeout-seeking tactics en vogue among the best modern pitchers. It was like watching Clayton Kershaw at a slower, fuzzier frequency.

Keuchel's ability to speak the dialect of the strikeout when the occasion calls for it—he currently strikes out 7.9 batters per nine innings on average, well back of baseball's premier strikeout artists but significantly ahead of archetypal ground-ball pitchers—has had the practical and immediate effect of elevating him from high-end innings-eater to true ace. This is a valuable thing for a club currently embroiled in an ahead-of-schedule division race.

More happily for those without an emotional investment in the Astros, it gives Keuchel's stranger, subtler talents a brighter stage and greater import. Baseball is stuffed with flamethrowing cyborgs who can strike out 11 on a given night. Dallas Keuchel doesn't always do that, and doesn't need to. He's more welcome than ever, and he's not going anywhere.