“It’s amazing how much weight he throws around,” says
teammate Kiké Hernández, “especially when it looks like
he’s going to break in half. The guy is built like the barbell.”
Buehler bulked up his lower body out of necessity. As a
sophomore in 2014 he logged 121^2 ⁄ 3 innings for Vanderbilt
(en route to its first College World Series title), the U.S. na-
tional collegiate team and the Cape Cod League champion
Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox. The next spring, as a consequence
of overuse and his pursuit of velocity, he missed the first two
weeks of Vanderbilt’s season with elbow soreness. By the
end of his junior season he had fallen to No. 3 in the Com-
modores’ rotation, and his mid-90s fastball had lost its life.
“I knew something was off,” he said, referring to his elbow.
“My last start before the draft I was like 86-90. That sucked.”
In the 2015 draft 23 teams passed on the still rather scraw-
ny kid—he was up to 170 pounds—with the decreased velocity.
The 24th pick belonged to the Dodgers, who had rated him
as the fifth-best player when the season began and still had
him ninth on their
board.
“We knew some-
thing wasn’t right,”
Friedman says now
of Buehler’s elbow.
“We didn’t know the
extent of it. There’s
no question he never gets to us if he didn’t have
a year like that. A lot of it was just hoping that he
would get to us.”
In the Dodgers’ draft room was Josh Byrnes,
who had been hired by the club after the previ-
ous season as senior vice president of baseball
operations after being fired by the Padres as their
GM. Club officials debated briefly whether to take
Buehler or Ke’Bryan Hayes, a high school infielder
who would go eight picks later to Pittsburgh.
“That was a fairly low debate,” says Byrnes,
who passed on Buehler in San Diego. “We felt if
Buehler got to our pick, that would be the one.
“We generally felt we were getting a top five,
top 10 talent who fell because of his junior year.
The pitcher he is now? I don’t think we predicted
that. It’s a pleasant surprise.”
The Dodgers signed Buehler to a bonus of
$1.78 million, $314,400 less than the slot amount.
Before he threw a pro pitch, Buehler under went
Tommy John surgery to repair the damaged liga-
ment in his elbow. He was out 12 months. Buehler
calls it “my gap year,” and after getting bypassed
by the Padres as a high school senior, it was the
next-best thing to happen to him.
Buehler dived even more into strength training,
adding 15 pounds during his rehabilitation. “It
was captivating to see Walk’s intensity and pure strength
under the bar in a squat rack,” says Phillies manager Gabe
Kapler, the Dodgers’ director of player development from
2015 to ’17. “He shared about his training at Vandy, but it
was still kind of shocking to see him get after it, squatting
heavy, then able to discuss the whys of training.
“This wasn’t a young minor league player blindly following
what our strength and conditioning coaches set up for him.
This was an intelligent athlete following his own intuition.”
With the introduction of Statcast pitch measurements in
2015, Buehler also used his downtime to learn more about
ball flight and pitch efficiency. By the time he came back,
Buehler was throwing the ball harder than ever—so hard
that his trainers would tell him to scale it back. “There was
a good month where they had a guy with a radar gun yelling
out certain velocities so I didn’t go above [them],” he says.
Buehler made his pro debut on July 7, 2016, for the Great
Lakes Loons, the Dodgers low-A-ball affiliate. It was 337 days37
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED
• AUGUS T 12, 2019
For the second year in a row, Buehler is in the top 25
among starters in spin rate on four different pitches.SPIN DOCTOR
PICKING UP STEAM
Buehler got off to
a slow start, but
since May 11 he has
a 2.56 ERA and has
struck out 120 batters
while walking just 11.