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On the mound, Keuchel is Syndergaard’s opposite. Where Syndergaard intimidates as he readies himself, staring hard at the batter, Keuchel seems happy to watch and wait. Instead of long hair, Keuchel has a Trappist’s beard, and when he finally delivers a pitch, he uses an unstressed delivery: lifted knee, quick step, left arm sailing over the top. Little League coaches could point to him as a model, and analysts swoon. “The guy has mastered his mechanics,” said the MLB Network analyst and Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz ahead of Keuchel’s start last Thursday against the New York Yankees.

Keuchel’s pitches, too, distinguish themselves. Today’s standard fastball is blistering but wire-straight, its objective not to duck under a bat but to blaze past it. Keuchel’s, by contrast, seems sentient. It goes slowly—88 miles per hour is plenty of zip, for him—but warps itself mid-flight. It darts left or right; it drops. Instead of swinging and missing, hitters often do something even more frustrating: knock the ball meekly into the grass, where a Houston infielder needs only to collect it and send it to first for the out.

To a certain type of baseball fan, Keuchel’s approach is commendable on an aesthetic basis alone. It exemplifies the difference between throwing, which any California or Texas teenager blessed with a big arm can do, and pitching. In that outing against the Yankees, Keuchel worked six innings and allowed only one run, lulling hitters with a blend of soft fastballs and even softer changeups. The Astros improved to 24-11, and Keuchel earned his sixth win of the season. “He was outstanding,” Smoltz said afterward, with a colleague’s admiration. It was not the sort of performance that would lead SportsCenter later in the evening, as Keuchel didn’t threaten the strikeout record or get close to a no-hitter. What set it apart was that it wasn’t mind-blowing, but sustainable.

This sustainability sits at the core of Keuchel’s worth to the Astros and, potentially, the sport. All pitchers carry risk, and Keuchel did miss the last month of his 2016 campaign with lingering shoulder inflammation, but even his injuries are old-fashioned. He needed nothing more than a winter’s rest—no surgery, no arduous rehab—to be ready for Spring Training. His Zen-like approach to pitching comes complete with a wellness component. The tears and strains that interrupt other careers for full seasons at a time have, to this point, avoided him.

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If pitchers like Keuchel are the what’s-old-is-new-again answer to ongoing injury woes, the question naturally follows: where to find them? This is where it gets tricky. Finding the next Keuchel may be as tough as hitting a homer off of the current one. The talents of someone like Syndergaard—or his high-octane New York teammate Matt Harvey, or the Washington Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg, significant injury victims all—are obvious at the early stages of development. These players throw their tremendous fastballs in high school and college and get selected in the first round of the MLB draft.