‘Feel like myself.’ How embattled Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler is salvaging his season

Three weeks ago, Mark Prior decided it was time to rip the Band-Aid off.

After watching Walker Buehler tinker, toil and tumble through 10 troubling starts in his return from a second career Tommy John surgery this season, the Dodgers pitching coach had a simple message for the right-hander ahead of a bullpen session in St. Louis last month.

Buehler had toyed around with his mechanics long enough.

If he was going to salvage his 2024 season, it was time to get back to the most fundamental of basics.

“It was a little bit like, ‘Hey man, we need to lock something down,’ ” Prior recalled this week. “It was very direct: ‘We need to get better at your delivery. You need to be able to get better at throwing strike one and getting ahead.’ So that was the main focus. That’s the only thing we cared about.”

During an up and (mostly) down start to 2024, Buehler lacked any such consistency.

His fastballs were fired like a shotgun, possessing plenty of velocity but little repeatable command. His breaking pitches would be pulled off the plate, or spiked in the dirt, or left hanging over the middle — without Buehler usually knowing until the ball was already out of his hand.

To call it frustrating for the 30-year-old, former two-time All-Star would be an understatement.

To say it confounded Buehler would undersell the toll it took on his usually unflappable psyche.

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“There’d be times that I would [command the ball] three or four in a row and be fine or whatever,” Buehler said. “And then games — whole games — where I couldn’t do it at all.”

Indeed, it wasn’t just that Buehler lacked his best stuff after almost two years away from the mound, while recovering from his second career Tommy John surgery in August 2022.

Instead, he rarely had any reliable stuff to count on at all; grinding through most early-season starts simply hoping batters would get themselves out before they punished mistakes he left over the plate.

“It’s like in golf, when you create a two-way miss, if you hook and a ball and then slice a ball, hook a ball and then slice a ball,” the Dodgers pitcher said this week. “If your baseline swing is not the same, it makes it really, really hard. Same thing with throwing a baseball.”

As his struggles deepened, culminating in a four-run, 3 ⅓-inning start against the Milwaukee Brewers on Aug. 14 that raised his season ERA over 6.00, Buehler started to wonder if he’d ever find a fix.

The list of successful two-time Tommy John pitchers, after all, is short.

And even though his stuff wasn’t totally diminished — his fastball still averaged 95 mph and the characteristics of his secondary weapons still encouraged Dodgers coaches — his performance had drastically waned.

“It’s always tough, man,” Buehler said. “There’s not that many people to look at and be like, ‘Hey, [after] the second Tommy John, it should be fine.’ You just don’t know. You don’t know if it’ll ever be the same or feel the same.”

But that’s the thing about pitching.

Sometimes, it can feel like every movement is wrong, like no variation of the delivery is right.

And then, in the span of even just one bullpen session, something will click.

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Three weeks ago, that’s what happened for Buehler in St. Louis.

“It’s just crazy,” Buehler said, “how little things can click and make such a big difference.”

If Buehler has looked like a different pitcher since then, giving up four earned runs while striking out 10 batters in his last two starts, it’s because he’s felt like it on the mound.

For the first time in years, he said, he has been able to pick up his left foot, fling his right arm toward the plate and throw the ball more or less where he wants to.

It began during an Aug. 28 outing against the Baltimore Orioles, when he pumped three first-pitch strikes in what was only his second 1-2-3 first inning of the season; the start of an encouraging 4 2/3 inning, two-earned-run outing. It continued against the Angels on Tuesday, when he had more strikeouts (six) than hits given up (five) for the first time since May and only the third time all year.

After both starts, Buehler claimed to “feel like myself” again — capable of working counts, attacking hitters and genuinely giving the Dodgers a chance to win.

Given the club’s uncertain pitching plans ahead of October, it has also turned the former Game 1 starter back into a possible postseason option, making him a candidate for a potential playoff rotation if he can continue his return to form over the season’s final three weeks.

“I think right now, Walker’s in compete mode,” manager Dave Roberts said after Buehler’s performance in Anaheim. “At some point, you’ve got to put mechanics aside and you’ve got to go out there and compete and make pitches. His last start, and tonight, I thought he did that.”

When asked about Buehler’s recent improvements this week, both the pitcher and his Dodgers pitching coaches pointed to his between-starts bullpen session in St. Louis last month.

Up to that point, Buehler had admittedly been “tinkering” too much with his mechanics, reverting to his old perfectionist habits at a time he needed to simplify his approach.

Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler

“He’s just a tinkerer,” Prior said. “Whether it’s pitches, grips, how he’s gonna approach a start and attack hitters. He’s always been that guy.”

During Buehler’s prime years, when he went 39-13 with a 2.82 ERA from 2018 to 2021 as the ace of the Dodgers starting staff, tinkering was one of his biggest strengths, making him an ever-evolving, unpredictable presence for opposing lineups.

“You never want to take away a guy’s creativity,” Prior said, “because usually that’s how guys get to where they are.”

But this year, Buehler’s constant adjustments became too much.

Early in the season, he was searching for old “feels” in his delivery, unsuccessfully attempting to mimic his pre-Tommy John mechanics.

“There was still some stuff that he was seeing and feeling that wasn’t necessarily there,” assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness said.

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“It did probably hamper him getting back to some sort of concrete foundation,” Prior added.

When Buehler went on the injured list in June with a hip injury, he spent nearly a month at the Cressey Sports Performance training center near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., going to the private pitching lab in search of a midseason solution.

“I probably didn’t help myself [with] the way that I think about pitching in terms of all the tinkering and stuff,” Buehler said after his start against the Orioles. “It probably made this process longer.”

That’s why, after Buehler issued a season-high four walks against the Brewers a month ago, he and Dodgers coaches set a simple goal for his bullpen session in St. Louis the following week.

“We didn’t care about other things like velocity, movements or anything [else],” Prior said. “It was like, just command the baseball, and master your delivery to get there.”

Suddenly, Buehler made a breakthrough.

For much of this year, Buehler now realizes he was getting “stuck back” in his delivery. Instead of transferring his weight toward the plate and driving down the mound with conviction, he subconsciously held back on throws to protect his surgically repaired elbow.

“When you rehab, you’re very conscious of how your elbow feels and how this feels and how that feels,” he said. “I was really stuck back, because you don’t want to leave your elbow to hang out to dry, basically.”

But with a new mindset came renewed execution.

During his St. Louis bullpen, Buehler turned his brain off, and thought only about lifting his leg and finishing each pitch.

Suddenly, he was not only commanding his fastball, but throwing it with more consistent crispness and life, McGuiness said. Same thing with his curveball, which featured “that second ‘umph,’ that second bite to it,” as McGuiness put it, a tell-tale sign of Buehler’s mechanics getting synced up.

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While his next start on Aug. 20 against the Seattle Mariners didn’t show it — he gave up three runs and got just one strikeout in four innings — Buehler had finally turned a corner.

“This one feels a little more in line with what he’s talking about,” McGuiness said, “kind of taking that next step forward.”

Buehler deadpanned that where he used to bemoan dozens of throws in his early-season starts, he is now only “upset about three or four.”

“I’m throwing a lot truer of a throw,” Buehler said. “I feel like I generally have a better idea of what the ball is going to do.”

Don’t confuse this with Buehler (who remains 1-4 with a bloated 5.67 ERA overall this year) being back at his peak.

He still hasn’t completed six innings in a start since May. He still made a couple of mistakes against a last-place Angels team Tuesday, twice taken deep on pitches he left up in the zone.

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However, he finally has a “baseline” delivery. It has led to more consistent first-pitch strikes, putting him ahead in counts. It has enabled him to attack with secondary stuff, especially a curveball he is using at a career-high rate. Most of all, it has allowed him to feel “like I could go and compete” once again, he said, re-stoking the competitive fire that once made Buehler one of baseball’s best big-game pitchers.

“It’s been better,” Prior said. “You’re starting to see some awkward swings. Guys are getting caught in-between speeds. He’s able to get in better counts and with more leverage.”

That might be enough for a Dodgers team looking for whatever production it can get from a banged-up starting staff. Right now, Jack Flaherty looks like the only lock for the team’s postseason rotation. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Gavin Stone and Clayton Kershaw could be options, but have to successfully return from injuries first.

That means, in all likelihood, the Dodgers will need at least one more arm to count on come the playoffs.

For much of this year, it didn’t look like Buehler would be in the equation.

But now, he has gotten back to basics, showing long-awaited flashes of the pitcher he used to be.

“When he has his confidence and he’s doing his thing, he’s one of the best in the game,” McGuiness said. “So we’re pumped for him moving forward.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.