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Walker Buehler was looking forward to returning to Yankee Stadium on Friday, June 6. He was finally taking part in one of the biggest rivalries in baseball and had recent success in that stadium when he closed out the 2024 World Series for the Dodgers. While it was likely foolish to expect him to dominate one of the hottest lineups in the majors, most people expected him to at least put together a solid outing.
Things didn’t go as planned.
Buehler lasted two innings, just six outs. He gave up seven runs (five earned), seven hits, two strikeouts and two walks. He was his typical self after the game, using expletives to describe his performance and being traditionally hard on himself. Both of those things were warranted after how he’s performed since returning to the rotation following a stint on the injured list. There was something else in those comments that caught my attention, though.
“I don’t want to dig too deep into it. Obviously, I’m throwing a lot of sliders. I’m throwing a lot of (the) two-seamer,” he said. “Those traditionally haven’t been what I do very often. And I think when the sweeper is never in the zone like it hasn’t been, the curveball’s gonna get hit more than it has, the cutter’s gonna get hit more than it has.”
This really feels like a thinly veiled shot at the pitching plan and coaching overall. It has been a common talking point during his recent starts that Buehler has swapped his traditional change-up for his slider, and he’s featuring a cutter almost as much as his traditional four-seam offering. Through those comments, it seems like there’s a directive from someone in the coaching staff, likely Andrew Bailey or Jason Varitek, to alter his pitch mix, and he’s unhappy with the decisions being made. If we look at the underlying numbers on these four pitches, we can see that he has a case to be made.
He’s thrown his four-seam 22.9% of the time, his cutter 17.3%, his slider 11.2%, and his change-up 9.4%. He’s getting more strikeouts on his change-up than the other three, the pitching sitting at a 23.8% strikeout rate. The change-up also holds the lowest walk rate of the three at a flat zero, though that's because his lacking command of the pitch means he refrains from throwing it on three-ball counts.
Where the numbers really support part of his argument is how opposing hitters are faring against each offering. His four-seamer has allowed a .323/.405/.710 slash line,, his cutter is at .406/.472/.688, his slider is at .304/.333/.348, and his change-up is at .263/.286/.263. When you look at that, you can start to agree with his complaints. He needs to be throwing his change-up more — it’s been a trusted pitch of his for years and yields the lowest opposing production out of his offerings. The cutter is also getting annihilated, and the slider isn’t much better.
Buehler features one pitch that hasn’t gotten a ton of talk and it’s performing better than all of the other ones mentioned so far. His sinker has been lights out. He owns a 23.3% strikeout rate and is sitting on a .139/.279/.167 slash line against. It sits around the same velocity as his four-seamer — 93.6 mph for the sinker and 93.8 mph for the four-seamer — and it seems to be a pitch he trusts enough to throw 17% of the time. It stands to reason that bumping the usage of both the change-up and sinker up while decreasing the usage of the cutter and slider would benefit Buehler and the team as a whole. The game planning coordinator and pitching coach, Jason Varitek and Andrew Bailey respectively, seem to disagree though.
At the end of the day, Walker Buehler needs to continue to own his bad outings, but there’s blame to be placed on the game and pitching plans. It regularly feels like teams are adjusting to what the Red Sox are doing, while the Red Sox are standing pat on what they developed before the series started, even when it’s not been working. The Red Sox have entered the toughest stretch of their schedule so far, and if the coaching staff is unwilling to alter game plans when it’s obvious that the current plan isn’t working, then it’s going to be obvious sooner than later that the team has no hope of turning things around.
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