Walker Buehler was looking for friends. What else do you do when, mere hours after leading the Los Angeles Dodgers to their first championship in a full season since 1988, you find yourself on a cross-country flight from the Bronx back to LA? But as Buehler, the pitcher who earned the save in the historic victory (following a win in Game 3), learned, his teammates canât quite hang like the fun-loving, free-wheeling 30-year-old from Kentucky.
âWe got home at 7:00 am LA time,â he recalled over Zoom recently, sitting in front of a home bar healthily stocked with bourbon. âI think I was the only person on the plane that didn’t sleep a wink. I was walking around checking, seeing who was awake. I made it no sleep until 8:00 p.m the next night. So I had a pretty good run.â
That statement is true in more ways than one. After a slight hiccup in San Diego during his first game of the postseason, Buehler was absolute nails. He blanked the Mets in his lone start of the National League Championship Series, then came back with five shutout innings in Game 3 of the World Series. Just two nights later, with the Dodgers running short on pitchers, he got the final three outs of the clinching game, turning Yankee Stadium into a library in the process. âIt got quiet in there,â Buehler said with a sly grin. âI think the coolest aspect of Yankee Stadium is that everyone’s not on top of you. There’s this size to it and everyone’s off of you a little bit, and that’s part of what makes it a really cool ballpark to play in. But when it gets quiet, it gets real big in there, and kind of airy.â
The way his 2024 campaign unfolded, Buehler was far from an obvious candidate to get the biggest outs of the year. By nearly every metric, the righthander had the worst season of his (otherwise mostly sterling) eight-year career. He had trouble finding the strike zone, struggled to keep the ball in the yard, and his ERA swelled. âDogshitâ is how he described it after the fact on Mookie Bettsâ podcast, recorded at the star outfielderâs sprawling SoCal mansion the night of the championship parade. (Because Buehler and the Dodgersâ last title came in 2020, this was his first parade.) But after taking the L in San Diegoâsurrendering six runs in one inning, putting the Dodgers in a 2-1 hole in the best-of-five seriesâBuehler let out some steam, and that seemed to solve everything.
âThat one inning was about as weird an inning as I’ve ever had in my career, let alone in the playoffs,â he said. âTo do it in that environment in San Diegoâbig rivalry, big talented teamsâit just sucked. I launched something in the dugout there and got a little upset, and things started going better after that. I think that San Diego game was a microcosm of the season: come out and struggle a little bit, and then figure it out at the end.â
The endâwhich came not only after a challenging season but also the second Tommy John surgery of his careerâcan be a little jarring for any ballplayer. Over the course of a season, baseball is all-consuming, what with its 162-game schedule and crisscross travel. Once the buzz wore off, the parade hit the finish line, and the rager at Mookieâs came to an end, Buehler found himself in unfamiliar territory. When he struck out Alex Verdugo to end Game 5, he not only secured the Dodgersâ eighth World Series trophy, he also officially became a free agent for the first time. And with the teamâs recent signing of stud pitcher Blake Snell, the writing is on the wall: Buehlerâs time in Dodger blue is likely coming to an end. As he geared up for October, the weight of each postseason startâplus that of a subpar regular season, and then the pressure of looming free agencyâsat on his shoulders like a silverback gorilla. No problem at all for the man nicknamed âBuehtane,â who prefers opening beer bottles with his teeth.
