Who can fix Walker Buehler? Is anyone?

Aside from a brief run last October, Walker Buehler was barely like a pitcher, and from 2019-21, Walker Buehler was barely like a pitcher, a surprising cameo that started in 2019-21 and helped the Dodgers win the championship. The Red Sox has re-opened the shots, and now the Phillies will try, hoping that he can at least provide some useful innings on the track and have a place in the playoff roster.

Buehler, 31, signed a one-year, $21.05 million deal with Boston in January, signing the Red Sox with a 5.89 fip in 112.1 innings, and returning to his second place last year compared to his 5.38 ERA at 75.1 Innings. He scored 22 starts for the Red Sox, but his ongoing struggle allowed the team to get him out of rotation after the start of the August 19 game, four innings, four steps, two runs against the Orioles. After a relief emerged, he allowed two runs in a 2.1 inning against the Yankees on August 24, and the Red Sox released him last Friday while still owing him about $3.4 million.

The Red Sox (77-62) tied with the lead of the AL wildcard, and despite many starting pitchers injured and disappointed, he considered replacing Buehler with rookie Richard Fitts. But when the 25-year-old rookie made the list of injured due to neuritis in his right arm, the team needed to add another starter, while Prospect Payth Payton Tolle cost Buehler’s call is in the 40-man lineup.

“[Our] Hope and our expectation are that we will be able to provide enough runways [Buehler] “But things have changed, we have the opportunity to settle down and transition into this role and then make some meaningful contributions to us,” Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow said Friday. [an injury with Richard] Fitts lost the length on the “pen” and needed a starter tonight, which felt like it was the best for the team. ”

Thanks to the looming deadline for playoff qualifications – players must play on the team’s 40-man roster or 60-day injured roster at noon on September 1 to play for the playoffs – Buehler has long been not in a free agent. The Phillies signed a minor league contract on Sunday. They will only pay him the minimum wage of the minimum wage, and the plan is that he will make a adjustment from Triple-A Lehigh Valley before being recalled.

This is not to say that Buehler will definitely start for Phillies in October, but they suddenly have an open. When Aaron Nola was out of the injured list for three months after being missed with a sprained right ankle, the Phillies planned to place him on a six-player spin along with Zack Wheeler, Cristopher Sánchez, Ranger Suárez, Jesús Luzardo and Taijuan Walker. Unfortunately, just when Nora was activated, Wheeler was found with a blood clot near his right shoulder, and last week the Phillies knew he would miss the rest of the season, and the next time it was relieved of the venous thoracic thoracic outlet syndrome due to surgery (rib removal).

While Wheeler’s losses – apart from his perennial season competition, he has been one of the best games in the playoffs in recent years – is Sanchez (2.65 ERA, 2.59 FIP), Suárez (3.02 ERA, 3.05 ERA, 3.05 FIP) and LUZARDO (4.05 ERA, 3.05 ERA, 3.02 FIP) are an easy choice. However, the fourth slot is about to grab, Nora (6.47 ERA, 5.04 FIP) is not doing well in returning to convince anyone that it is a strong choice. Walker pitched with 3.92 ERA and 4.88 FIP in 105.2 innings, and he could be the fourth-place lead candidate. He scored solid results in August (3.14 ERA, 3.23 FIP in 28.2 innings), although the numbers were filled by two starts against the Nationals and games against the Orioles. His last two starting points are matches against contenders, first with the Mets on August 27 and then with the Brewers on Sunday. The two teams combined 17 hits and 9 against him in 9 innings.

With Andrew Painter of the highest prospect, who was a 22-year-old right-hander who threw 5.36 ERA and 4.92 FIP (a hat on the situation at some point) in the Lehigh Valley, the Phillies decided to look outside the organization, and several things for Buehler exceeded his minimum cost, in the favor of Buehler. On the one hand, he had a good opinion of him when the Phillies played against them on July 21. He allowed two hits (1 gain) six hits and one walk while hitting four innings in seven innings, matching his longest game of the season. Another team held a video conference with Buehler, Philadelphia’s pitching coach Caleb Cotham, who was on the same school as Vanderbilt, beat the game.

“This year isn’t as good for him as in other years, but we still like a lot of his stuff,” Baseball Operations president Dave Dombrowski said Sunday. “We think we see something that can help him. He is willing to work with us.”

With both Sánchez and Luzardo’s pace culminating in new careers, giving them an extra few days off in September is not a bad idea, and adding Buehler to the rotation is not hurt. There is nowhere to go when it comes to performance. Buehler’s 16.5% strikeout rate and 10.8% walk rate are both career worst, down from last year’s 18.6% strikeout rate and 8.1% walk rate… at least a few steps down from his peak:

coin. Mind the gap there; the dotted line covers the fact that Buehler is 23 months from June 2022 to May 2004 without playing in the major league games. He didn’t start surgery on Tommy John until August 23, 2022, and although it was his second (his second time was in August 2015, after the Dodgers drafted him with the knowledge he needed to do the program, he recovered from a rehabilitation in Oklahoma City, and on September 3, 2023, his second distributors trained one with him, but his possibility was with his second contact. It took 15 months or more to return to the profession, which is worth mentioning whether the early escalation led to the decline of Buehler.

While Buehler’s average four-hole fastball doesn’t have much speed from 2022 (95.2 mph) to 24 (95.0), it has exited from its 96.8 mph peak in the ’20. Now, he averages 94.0 mph, his arm angle dropped from 51 degrees in 2021 to 46 degrees in 22 years and 24 degrees to 43 degrees this year. Even though he mixed up for the recession-responsive four-pin soldiers (emphasizing his sinker, cutter and slider), the pitch modeling system did not buy his products for sale:

Even last year, PitchingBot and Stuff++ watched Buehler’s stuff and position/command combinations enough to make average or higher. With both measures, these things fall off, the location/command is even worse. Stuff+ still rated Buehler’s slider (including sweepers) and knuckle curves to above-average pitches, but PitchingBot doesn’t consider any of them as average (50 on the 20-80 scout scale).

As you can see, Bueheler throws many different courses. He mixed them together according to the handshake of the batter, throwing them together with his slider, sweeper and cutter to the four sinker on the right. He threw sinker pieces onto the lefties much less and almost completely used the knuckle curve against the lefties:

The problem is that while his mix is ​​usually against rights, it doesn’t go against left-handed:

Buehler’s overall plagiarism (.329 Woba allowed to the right, .384 targeted the left) only hints at his problem. The right is beating the tar from the growing number of pedestrian four-pin and suddenly ineffective cutters, but even so, his sinker, slider and sweeper are very effective for them, both of which are producing high whif speeds. By contrast, unless you want to give him some leeway, he doesn’t have any good effect on left-handed unless you want to give him some leeway, thus the gap between the actual result and the expected result in his change, which is only 11.2% of his time. Last year, the knuckle curves produced at least 29.4% WHIFF rate for left-handed while fixing them on the .311 Woba, while the cutter held them on the .264 WOBA.

Some of Bühler’s ineffectiveness is attributed to his poor command and position. Here are the regional percentages that allowed against him when facing the right, while Waubas allowed against him:

As you can see, over the course of these seasons, Buller’s spit rate has dropped, and the slash statistics against batsmen have improved. Looking closer, you can also see that, for example, in 2022, 7.6% of Buehler’s four shoemakers ended up in the middle of the plate (Gameday Zone 5), and the batsman produced .414 Woba on them. The 12 four-player racers they played against home run ended there 1-5. In 2024, despite a lot of other issues, the middle percentage dropped to 4.3%, while the woba dropped to .000, as the right side made a 3-0 deal against six quarters of four-timers. This year, 12.9% of Buehler’s four-timers to the right have middle class in the middle, who hit the game with a 1.004 woba, having four home runs on those 26 courts in a 9-9 game. mercy.

Given how many different tones Buehler throws, we can fill out the entire article with this comparison, but these figures usually tell variations of the same story. Here is Buehler’s percentage of area, while Wobas allows his knuckle curve when facing left-handed:

The biggest home here is outside the area, especially in the lower half: when left-handed, the shadows change from various light blues to pink, and the court is stopped when left and right below the strike zone, causing Buehler’s popularity to drop by about 10 percentage points, while his WOBA’s WOBA is almost the same from 2022 to 2022. The power that used to be turned into responsibility.

At present, these numbers don’t have many reasons for Buehler. Still, just 11 months ago, he rebounded from a tough regular season in the regular season, making his second inning of six straight wins against San Diego, putting 13 innings against Padres, the Mets and Yankees, and ending the World Series with his dramatic, unexpected, unexpected role in October. I wouldn’t expect lighting twice, but there’s still plenty of room between ensuring the last three games of a season and providing available situations in the process, and in that vast situation, maybe Buehler and Phillies could find him a niche to help him.