Steve Webb
BRONX, NY — If this was the end, what a way to go! If this indeed is Walker Buehler’s final start in Dodger blue, it was the perfect encapsulation of who this guy is as a pitcher and as a man. Scared of nothing, intimidated by no one, clutch to his core. It was a performance that was vintage Walker Buehler. Let me rephrase that, we shouldn’t have expected anything else from the guy who earned the nickname Walker F’N Buehler.
There were times this season where this outcome and this level of performance were very much in doubt. When he was getting shelled after his first few starts, when he left the team to work in Florida for a long stretch to be with a private sports performance specialist because he “needed to be somewhere else.” When he was rumored to being close to not even making the postseason rotation. Indeed, if Glasnow, Stone, and Kershaw had all been healthy, it’s hard to see Walker Buehler sneaking in there, given his lackluster regular season performance.
But the signs were there if you looked hard enough. After posting a 9.00 ERA in June, and his trip to Florida, he showed steady signs of improvement upon his return, putting up a 6.00 ERA in August, and a 4.44 ERA in September.
But Walker Buehler has always been like that foreign sports car that sees more time in the shop than on the road. It might not work all time, but when you finally get it rolling, it is a glorious machine. Once the bright lights of October hit, you couldn’t have asked for a better Walker Buehler. Even in the one game that he lost, he pitched well. After being done dirty by his defense and crushing an unsuspecting water cooler in San Diego, Buehler didn’t sit and pout (much). He went back out to the mound and threw three more scoreless innings, preserving the bullpen for the next day. He had to wear those six runs that day, but now that mark seems more like a badge of honor.
Each postseason start got successively better. He went only four innings but held the Mets scoreless while the offense went wild in what ended up being an 8-0 shutout. His strikeout of Francisco Lindor on a wicked curveball with the bases loaded was the stuff of legend. One would be tempted to say it was vintage Walker Buehler, but that is not quite right. Vintage Walker would have blown Lindor’s doors off with some high heat. This Walker who threw that curveball on a 3-2 count wasn’t vintage. It was better.
And then came Game 3 of the World Series. And again, Buehler silenced every doubter in the country with five innings of mastery over the Yankees. “Walker was fantastic,” said manager Dave Roberts after the game. “I think if you know if you take out that second inning (in San Diego) where we didn’t play good defense behind him, he would have thrown up nothing but zeros in the postseason uh tonight I just thought his stuff was as good as it’s been all year I thought–the fast ball had life um the cutter was good the curveball was good he pitched to all quadrants and kept those guys honest kept them at Bay um there was no stress um so just to get through five innings the way he threw the baseball I felt that’s all he had obviously there was a little bit of kind of emotions adrenaline and uh I couldn’t have asked for anything more from Walker tonight.”
Indeed. This performance brings his World Series ERA to 0.50 over three starts (in ’18, ’20, and now ’24). 0.50. That is legendary, practically Koufax-level excellence. My Bleed Los buddy Cody Snavely made the comment that maybe the reason the Dodgers didn’t go to far the last two years is that Buehler wasn’t pitching. You can’t even fathom the possiblity that he would fail to show up with the bell rang, and that includes pitching on short rest when Max Scherzer bails on you in 2021. The guy posts.
Now, nobody has a crystal ball, so it’s impossible to guess where he might land after free agency. But if he winds up in Dodger blue, I for one would be just fine with that.
After all, he’s Walker F’N Buehler.
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