Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
Never has a 4-inning, 90-pitch outing from a starting pitcher been so impactful and important. OK, never might be stretching it, but Walker Buehler showed shades of his former self during Wednesday night’s Game 3 win in New York.
I wrote earlier on Wednesday about his disappearing whiffs and his 4-seam fastball problem. Well, he obviously read the article, took my advice to heart and changed some things up. It wasn’t the coaches, data analysts, et al, who did the leg work to help Buehler regain some of his past success.
Anyway, let’s look at the strikeouts and whiffs. Buehler had 18 whiffs and six strikeouts. The 18 whiffs are the most in a game in more than three years. Here is the breakdown of whiffs.
| Pitch | Whiffs | Swings | Whiff% | Whiff% (Reg.) |
| 4-Seam Fastball | 3 | 8 | 37.5 | 16.9 |
| Sweeper | 6 | 9 | 66.7 | 29.4 |
| Knuckle Curve | 6 | 7 | 85.7 | 26.7 |
| Cutter | 2 | 6 | 33.3 | 21.5 |
| Sinker | 1 | 4 | 25 | 11.5 |
One game is a small sample size, but the fact that he got so many chases on his breaking pitches is awfully encouraging. And the funny thing is, he was kinda all over the place at times. He threw a lot of uncompetitive breaking pitches — mostly sweepers and cutters — but his curveball came up huge against Francisco Lindor in the second inning.
Walker Buehler strikes out Francisco Lindor to get out of a bases-loaded jam 😤🔥 pic.twitter.com/Jk3ch2cR4a
— MLB (@MLB) October 17, 2024
He also got some meaningful whiffs on his sweeper, most notably, against J.D. Martinez in the third inning.
¡Enorme la sweeper de Walker Buehler! El diestro vuelve a salir de los problemas con un ponche. En esta ocasión su víctima fue J.D. Martínez y cuelga otra argolla en el tercer inning. #LetsGoDodgers 2#MetsWin 0 pic.twitter.com/NuvDjv353z
— Erick Aguirre (@erick_aguirreh) October 17, 2024
Those were two of his best pitches of the night.
As for the fastball usage, Buehler threw it just 27% of the time in Game 3. The average velocity was actually down 1.2 MPH from the 95 MPH mark in the regular season and down 1.1 from his NLDS start against the Padres. The biggest difference? The spin rate. His average 4-seam spin rate on Wednesday night was 2,365 RPM, up from 2,288 in the NLDS and 2,280 in the regular season. It still wasn’t his best pitch — far from it. But for Game 3, it was acceptable. This could be the plan for Buehler for the remainder of this season (however long that might be) and something he can do going forward.
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It was a big game for both teams. Buehler has been a big-game pitcher in the past (though, not recently). Short of a miraculous return to previous form, this is about the best we and the Dodgers could have expected.
Buehler might have just reinvented himself on the biggest stage of the 2024 season thus far. That is impressive in its own right. Now, let’s see if he can carry it over to and/or build upon it for a potential Game 7 of the NLCS or Game 1 of the World Series.
