NEW YORK — They made it through April, and they made it through May, and as September wore down, the Houston Astros were still hanging on.
All of a sudden it was October, and the Astros were still playing. And even on a Tuesday night when Yankee Stadium finally got loud again, the young Astros were up for it.
Even in an inning and a moment guaranteed to scare, the young Astros didn’t scare.
They proved their worth as their ace Dallas Keuchel proved his, and maybe those two things are even more connected than we could have guessed. He was ready for the postseason and so were they. When their 3-0 win over the New York Yankees in the American League Wild Card Game was over, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow was sipping champagne and talking about how well his team has played against the Kansas City Royals the last two years.
“We’re going there to have fun, but we’re coming for business,” Luhnow said, and while you still have to make the Royals the favorites, the Astros are no longer an easy team to dismiss.
The Royals showed 12 months ago how a young team could succeed and how a Wild Card Game win could get a team going. The Astros’ win over the Yankees was nowhere near as dramatic as the Royals’ win last year over the Oakland A’s, but it could turn out just as meaningful.
Their own manager spoke this week about the challenge of playing in New York, but it turned out his players embraced it. It turned out Keuchel embraced it most of all, and when the stadium got the craziest, he reacted the best.
It was the sixth inning, and it was 2-0 Astros, as a result of home runs from Colby Rasmus and Carlos Gomez. But the Yankees had two on with two out and Alex Rodriguez at the plate, and for the first time (and what turned out to be the only time) all night, the Yankees and their fans really began to believe.
Keuchel had thrown 86 pitches to that point, and manager A.J. Hinch went to the mound still unsure of what to do. He spoke later about “checking the heartbeat,” about looking in Keuchel’s eyes and about “gauging the room temperature a little bit.”
He trusted in his ace—the 27-year-old left-hander who was standing out there just taking it all in.
“The stadium was rocking; that’s for sure,” Keuchel would say later. “A-Rod’s coming up. Doesn’t get any more exciting than that.”
He had pitched Rodriguez well in the past (1-for-7, four strikeouts) and in two earlier at-bats Tuesday. He saw something in one of his swings during the second at-bat and decided a first-pitch cutter would work.
“I knew if I could elevate it or get it middle in, I had a good shot to just have him pop it up,” Keuchel said.
Yeah, in the biggest at-bat of his season, and his team’s season, one of the most extreme ground-ball pitchers in baseball went looking for a pop-up. And he got it.
“I was playing Blackjack, and it paid off,” he said.
It always has for Keuchel against the Yankees. Tuesday’s game was his third against them this season, and in 22 innings they never did score a run.
The cutter to A-Rod was the last pitch Keuchel threw Tuesday, but the Yankees would never bring the tying run to the plate again. Not this year, anyway.
The Astros moved on, with Keuchel vowing the Astros are “going to have as much fun as we can in Kansas City.”
They’re a fun team—the way young teams often are, the way teams that haven’t won in years often are. The Yankees were in the postseason for the first time in three years, but so much of their season seemed like drudgery.
Even if the Yankees had won Tuesday, they never looked like a team that could go far this postseason. They were too thin on the pitching staff, too vulnerable against left-handed pitchers, too old and too beat-up.
The Astros have their faults, too. The failure to win a division they led for 139 days means Keuchel won’t be able to pitch in the first two games against the Royals. They strike out too much. Their bullpen is shaky, although the new Tony Sipp-to-Will Harris-to-Luke Gregerson combo worked again Tuesday.
But the one thing that no longer is a question is whether they’re ready for all this—whether they can handle it.
“You saw a lot of what’s right about Astros baseball,” Hinch said. “We homered, we stole a few bases…we got a two-out hit from [Jose] Altuve, we got some gutsy pitching out of Keuchel and our bullpen and we had some big plays on defense.
“I think that’s what we do when we’re at our best. And as I’ve said before, our best is good enough.”
Good enough in April and good enough in May. And good enough Tuesday night…on the big October stage.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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