Dallas Keuchel strikes out 10 to lead Astros to 2-1 defeat of Yankees in Game 1 of ALCS

Dallas Keuchel can’t correctly judge balls in the air. In the second after bat meets ball, the Houston Astros left-hander fears every medium-length fly hit off of him is bound to depart the ballpark.

“That’s not a good feeling to have,” he said. “So, I try to keep it on the ground.”

No one is better at keeping the ball on the ground, not this season, and not Friday night at Minute Maid Park, when Keuchel held the New York Yankees to four singles over seven scoreless innings. His Astros manufactured two runs out of six singles to win 2-1 in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series.

All across the sport this season, baseballs soared out of ballparks at rates unseen since the steroid era. Inside clubhouses, players speculated about the source of the spike. Something was different with the balls themselves, pitchers insisted. The launch-angle revolution had taken hold, hitters argued.

Amid all that, the Yankees and Astros clobbered more home runs than anyone else in the sport. Of course, when the two teams met Friday, they made 50 outs before mustering one. Finally, with two out in the ninth inning, New York’s Greg Bird banged a ball off the Chick-Fil-A cow atop the right-field foul pole. It was too late. The solo shot only halved Houston’s lead. The score became final within two minutes.

“It’s a solo home run,” said Astros closer Ken Giles, the man who gave it up. “You can’t really do too much with a solo home run.”

As long as playoff series have existed, so has the question of what game in a series matters most. Is it the first, the second, the third, the last? It’s unclear. But the first game is most indicative, forcing teams to declare the way they’d like to play the rest of the way.

With their plate patience on Friday, the Yankees made it clear they would rather face the Astros’ middle relievers than their starters. The Astros sent the opposite message, albeit less aggressively. It makes sense: New York’s strength, and Houston’s weakness, is in relief.

The Yankees did not force an Astros outfielder into action until there were two out in the third inning. They struck out 14 times, 10 times against Keuchel. They hardly put the ball into play, intent on forcing him out of the game.

He was similarly set on pounding the lower third of the strike zone with his lightly biting sinkers, the pitch Astros third baseman Alex Bregman called “gross.” Forty-two of Keuchel’s first 64 pitches sank. Only the third time he traversed the Yankees’ lineup did he mix in more breaking balls.

Yankees starter Masahiro Tanaka mostly matched Keuchel, holding Houston hitless until Jose Altuve poked a fourth-inning grounder up the middle and beat Starlin Castro’s throw to first by a few milliseconds. On Tanaka’s 1-and-1 pitch to Carlos Correa, Altuve stole second base. Correa lined the next offering into left field, and Altuve scored easily for the game’s first run. Correa scored the second when Yuli Gurriel slapped a misplaced sinker up the middle.

“We felt like we had a huge lead at 2-0,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said.

Keuchel maintained it. When two Yankees reached base without an out in the fifth, he procured a soft lineout from Todd Frazier, then a strikeout of Brett Gardner. Keuchel fired four consecutive sliders to the same low-and-away spot, and Gardner laid off two for balls. His patience was finite, though, as he swung at and missed the fourth.

Up next, Aaron Judge waited out six sliders until the count read 3-and-2, then he ripped a seventh for a single into left field. Marwin Gonzalez, the converted infielder and nascent outfield star fired a one-hop rocket that reached home before Yankees baserunner Bird. Brian McCann applied the two-hand tag, which was confirmed after review.

It wasn’t close, but Yankees manager Joe Girardi challenged it anyway, his decision not to challenge a key call in Game 2 of the ALDS looming large inside his brain.

“God knows I’m not doing that again,” Girardi said.

The Astros, too, have smarted from failure.

On Friday afternoon, Altuve thought back to his first playoff trip, two years ago. Those Astros beat the Yankees in the wild-card game, then took a 2-1 series lead on Kansas City in the division series. In Game 4 in this same ballpark, they raced out to a four-run lead, then watched the Royals come back in a torturous 40-minute half-inning. Two days later, the Astros’ season was over, and Altuve won’t soon forget the feeling.

“We learned,” he said, “that we have to complete the 27 outs to win the game.”

pedro.moura@latimes.com

Follow Pedro Moura on Twitter @pedromoura