after his surgery. His second of three appearances in 2016—all
scoreless—came for the Arizona League Dodgers five weeks
later. He hit 98 mph.
L
AST SEASON, in his third career start, Buehler
threw the first six innings of a combined no-hitter
against the Padres. And then he got better.
When he wasn’t sharp following a three-week
absence with a broken rib, he sat down with pitching coach
Rick Honeycutt to watch video of all of his strikeouts. He
figured out the difference: From three weeks of only playing
catch he had developed a bad habit of separating his hands
too high. After he returned to separating them lower, he had
a 2.09 ERA over his last 16 starts.
He also developed a cut fastball on the fly and added a
second variety of curveball. Since his
surgery Buehler had thrown his curve
with a “spiked” grip (with the nail of
the index finger dug into the baseball),
but when he experimented with a tra-
ditional grip he found that it spun 200
rpm faster. Likewise, his slider shifts
based on where he places his fingers. “I
change that all the time,” he says. “As
you go through a year, your arm is going
to move a tick different here and there.”
Nothing better defines Buehler’s
combination of skill and savvy than the
sleight of hand he creates with his fastball. As batters look to
hit more fly balls, many pitchers counter by throwing fastballs
higher in the zone, so that hitters can’t square them up. But
by watching hitters’ reactions and by checking data from
pitch-tracking devices, Buehler discovered that his fastball
is even more effective when he throws it low. It’s because of
a phenomenon he calls “perceived rise.” Buehler’s fastball
spins so much that when the hitter thinks it’s falling out of
the strike zone, it holds its plane. The ball doesn’t actually
rise, but it appears to the hitter to do so.
Buehler threw his fastball 173 times in the bottom third of
the strike zone last year; 106 of them were taken for a strike.
Only seven times did someone get a hit off it. “It’s more fun
pitching with velocity,” he says. “You get away with more. I
think that’s why it’s such an evolution in the game.
“That’s what gets you to the big leagues now. You’re going
to get recruited based on velocity, so how can you blame
anyone for chasing it? Now, does that stink for a guy that’s
86 to 88 and can really command it? Yeah, it does stink. It’s
just the reality of it.”
Buehler throws every fastball as hard as he can, even in his
bullpen sessions. “If I don’t think I can throw the ball hard
and throw it well that day in the bullpen, I don’t throw it,”
he says. “I want to practice what I’m going to do in a game.”
I
T IS striking, knowing how hard he can throw a
baseball, to see how narrow Buehler is. He is a long
braided cord of sinews and fascia, as tightly woven
as the rope of a catapult. Says Hill, “We can take all
the information we want, but when it comes down to it, you’re
a boxer in the ring. You need to love to compete. And what’s
what I love about watching him pitch. That’s the x-factor.
And he has that.”
Before the season
Buehler had hoped for an
elite first-pitch-strike per-
centage, a sub-3.00 ER A,
a strikeout per inning
pitched, 200 innings and,
if luck is with him, 20 wins.
He won’t win 20, but the
rest of the marks are attain-
able. Only two Dodgers ever
posted a season like that:
Koufax in 1965 and Clay-
ton Kershaw in 2011. For
one pitch on one night last
October, the three of them
were connected. “Of all
my moments as a Dodger,”
Byrnes says, “him walking
off the mound in the World
Series and Sandy Koufax
standing and applauding him is my favorite. That one picture
is unforgettable.”
In September 2016, Byrnes traveled to Midland, Mich.,
to watch the Loons play in the Midwest League playoffs.
When Beuhler saw the former Padres GM who had passed
him over, he had a question.
“Did I ever tell you my story about the 2012 draft?”
“No, what’s that?”
Then Buehler told Byrnes all about the draft party, the
house full of people and Walker Weickel.
“I felt awful,” Byrnes says.
Buehler told him it was O.K., that the Padres’ not picking
him turned out to be the best thing to happen to him.
Embedded in every freakish fastball Buehler throws is a
lesson. Its greatest power comes not from how fast it flies,
how wickedly it spins or where it is going, but in what is
behind it. ±
38
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED
• AUGUS T 12, 2019
“He can pull it off because he’s so likable and because he can back it up,”
says Freese of Buehler’s TR ASH TALK. “He’s just a good dude with
an amazing arm. He’s going to win a Cy Young or four.“
HARRY H
OW
/GETTY IM
AGES
WALKER BUEHLER
