Houston Astros: A Career Comeback For Dallas Keuchel?

The Houston Astros are almost a week down in the season with more than 157 games before determining if this team has what it takes to get to the promised land.

This team is loaded with the necessary tools to get there and it remains to be seen if they have what it takes to get to the mountaintop.

With one series down against the Seattle Mariners and the next one underway with the Kansas City Royals, this month will be pivotal in ensuring that this team doesn’t have a horrific start as opposed to April 2016, to which they went 4-17.

But something tells me that they’ve learned from what went wrong last year and things will turn around.

This assertion is going by faith alone and certainly not by the stats up by the team so far.

Through five games, the Houston Astros have popped seven homers but still hold steady batting at a paltry average of .217.

The long ball is what carried this team in 2015 — along with timely hitting — but I hope it’s not something we die by because that would mean that we’re one-dimensional, something that wouldn’t be necessarily categorized with a championship-caliber team.

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But enough about the team, let’s talk about a guy that seems to be on a mission to prove that he belongs in this league.

You know who I’m talking about.

Yep, that’s Dallas Keuchel, our beaded No. 1 on the mound.

I attended this past Monday’s Opening Day extravaganza and Keuchel’s performance certainly did not disappoint.

He was extremely tactical with his pitching — as he usually has been — working through the batting order with near-precision.

As we all know, he doesn’t have to use a lot of gas to throw his batters off but he can fool you with his change-up, or 85-mph four-seam fastball or just his pure athleticism.

Yes, I’m talking about that amazing 1-4-3 turn he did late in the game by leaping up in the air, catching a chopper and letting Jose Altuve and Yulieski Gurriel finish up the double-play that he put into motion.

Keuchel ending up finishing up pitching 7.0 spectacular innings allowing two hits, walking two and fanning four while playing shutout ball, earning his first win of the season.