“And that’s the key word — disrupt,” Keuchel said. “I’m trying to make it a craft, like artwork.”

Keuchel induces the batter to hit the ball weakly, off the handle or the end of the bat. Then he can trust his fielders, or himself, to take care of it. Keuchel, who played center field when he was not pitching in high school, has won two Gold Gloves. Like Maddux, who won 18, he commands pitches that can run in either direction on both sides of the plate.

“He always presents to the hitters a strike, whether it’s a strike or not, as it crosses the strike zone,” said Brent Strom, the Astros’ pitching coach. “So there’s always a sense that these pitches are hittable, but he’s done a really good job of dictating how they’re hit.”

Sometimes, of course, they are not hit at all. Keuchel ranked fifth in the A.L. in strikeouts last season, with 216, and speaks of one of them with awe. Working from the extreme third-base side of the rubber last August, he tempted Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera with a fastball down the middle that suddenly veered low and away, far off the plate. Cabrera, a four-time batting champion, took the bait.

“At those moments, it’s like, ‘I made a ball come out of my hand and it ended up a foot off the plate and he swung and missed it,’ ” Keuchel said. “It’s like, I’m getting the best hitter in the game to swing at something so far out of the zone, it had to have looked like a strike, at some point.”

Keuchel dominates with his two-seamer and slider (he calls it a slurve), and with a changeup that O’Brien encouraged him to throw inside to left-handers, citing Glavine. O’Brien has always believed Keuchel could win — he called him the most competitive high school pitcher he has seen — but stressed the value of the changeup to his arsenal.

“It might have been a game where he had pitched pretty well, and he said, ‘Tonight, I didn’t need it,’ ” O’Brien said. “And I said: You need it. The changeup is a pitch-saver. It’ll save you 10 pitches a game.”