Walker Buehler Looks For Checkmate

Here is an embarrassing sentence: After reading the newest Sally Rooney novel, I started playing a lot of chess. I’m not good, but I have been spending a lot of time trying to get better (tips are appreciated). All this chess got me thinking about the cliché that the batter-pitcher duel is like a chess match.

One thing I’ve learned? Getting your pieces in a good position to execute a checkmate is not the same skill as actually executing. The former follows a straightforward logic, playing the percentages on any given move, calculating the arithmetic of this or that trade; the latter is an art, relying on second-order thinking to design the final decisive move. Pitching is similar — to get on the front foot, the pitcher needs to throw two strikes before throwing two balls; the pitcher starts with the element of surprise and the hitter in an aggressive mindset. But when the hitter gets to two strikes, he will play defense, perhaps slowing his swing for accuracy while fouling off close pitches. In both chess and pitching, the killer move requires a little pizzazz.

In his return this season from a second Tommy John surgery, Walker Buehler wasn’t even thinking about checkmate. Through August, he was among the worst pitchers in the league at getting to two strikes before two balls. He was nibbling without great command, and he didn’t seem to have the confidence in his fastball to challenge hitters over the plate. Instead, he frequently fell behind, setting up a tightrope act from which he rarely escaped unscathed.

In recent starts, however, Buehler appears to be turning a corner — just in time for the one of the biggest starts of his career.

Buehler is lined up to start either Game 3 or Game 4 of the World Series. Whatever the game, Buehler will be charged with going through the order twice with a ring on the line. Those are 18 high-stakes outs.

Because of his inability to gain count leverage, the Buehler of August wouldn’t even be in a conversation to take on those outs. Announcers like to talk about getting strike one, but there is less dialogue about how often a pitcher gets ahead of the hitter. It’s annoying to calculate, which might be one reason. But I think the leaderboard captures something about the aggressiveness of a pitcher, some mixture of stuff quality and trust in that stuff.

By this measure — defined as the percentage of their counts that started 0-2 or 1-2 — Garrett Crochet was a star this season, unafraid to challenge hitters with top-tier filth. Bryan Abreu, one of the worst command guys at least in the eyes of the Kirby Index, also ranked among the leaders. Even with pretty bad command, Abreu still started many at-bats in a favorable position because his stuff allows him to pitch with maximum aggression:

Of course, it’s harder to be aggressive with subpar stuff. Think of a guy like Jose Quintana, who famously nibbled his way into tough spots. Quintana himself recognized this was not sustainable — as Jay Jaffe wrote about just last week, Quintana upped his four-seam usage down the stretch after an edict from manager Carlos Mendoza.

“He stopped nibbling and he started attacking,” Mendoza said. “He [had been] getting behind, walking a lot of people, and he said, ‘Screw it, I’m going to go after people,’ and just went with it and fixed it.”

For most of the 2024 regular season, Buehler pitched more like Quintana than Crochet. He got ahead of 36% of hitters, ranking in the 17th percentile of all pitchers by get-ahead rate. But in September and into the 2024 playoffs, Buehler moved to the other side of the bell curve. More often, he’s finding himself with an edge, reaching 0-2 or 1-2 counts to 43% of the hitters he’s faced in the postseason. Notably, he’s done so against lefties by increasing his early-count use of curveballs and cutters while pursuing a five-pitch kitchen sink strategy against right-handed hitters.

Pitching coach Mark Prior played a role in Buehler’s progress. Jack Harris wrote a story about Buehler for the Los Angeles Times last month, where he described a wary and uncertain Buehler tinkering with his grips, his mechanics, and his approach upon return from his second Tommy John. After a conversation with Prior, Buehler simplified his mechanics and started to go after hitters.

“It was a little bit like, ‘Hey man, we need to lock something down,’” Prior told Harris about his conversation with Buehler. “It was very direct: ‘We need to get better at your delivery. You need to be able to get better at throwing strike one and getting ahead.’ So that was the main focus. That’s the only thing we cared about.”

After a rough start, Buehler is finally succeeding at gaining leverage, trusting his stuff to get ahead of hitters. But he’s still working on that second bit, the endgame — putting hitters away:

Buehler’s issues putting away hitters with two strikes reached absurd levels in the second inning of his first playoff start against the Padres. Five Padres ultimately scored in the inning. Some of that was the result of some seriously poor defense behind Buehler, but some of it was a mind-boggling run of gaining leverage on hitters and then failing to put them away. Buehler got to 0-2 or 1-2 on six hitters; five of them reached base, including an 0-2 homer he gave up to a locked-in Fernando Tatis Jr.:

In this sequence, Buehler threw 10 pitches on 0-2 or 1-2. Each of them was either a four-seam fastball or his slow knuckle-curve. The pitch selection illuminates the reasons he is struggling so much with finishing off hitters with two strikes.

Even though Buehler’s fastball has returned to roughly the same velocity band as his pre-surgery peak, the pitch has lost a ton of life, dropping two additional inches compared to his pre-surgery levels. It’s possible this is due to an increase in his supination bias, which is the natural tendency to throw more on the outside of the ball.

This can happen when rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. Tyler Zombro discussed the ways that Cole Ragans’s fastball shape changed after TJ in a recent Tread video.

But Ragans started out with a strong pronation bias, meaning he had a tendency to get inside the ball; Buehler’s always had a “cutty” four-seamer, and in part because his arm angle dropped five degrees relative to 2021, the pitch is now sitting in the dead zone:

Buehler’s curveball — absent a surprise situation, like in his full-count breaker to Francisco Lindor in the NLCS — isn’t really a great whiff pitch either. Generally, a curve is best used in early counts to grab called strikes; because of the big vertical movement and low speeds, it does not tunnel particularly well with a four-seam fastball, making it easy to take or foul off in late-count contexts.

A hard glove-side breaker would solve this problem. Given that Buehler shows supinator tendencies, it figures that he could access a shape between his cutter and his sweeper that travels closer to fastball speeds and stays in his four-seam tunnel for a longer period of time. (I’ve circled the ideal movement shape on his pitch plot.)

Buehler sort of showed what that could look like in his next start against the Mets on a punchout of Mark Vientos:

That pitch moved seven inches glove side at 92-mph, elite horizontal movement at that velocity. But this pitch doesn’t have ideal depth: At nine inches of induced vertical break, it hangs up a little bit in the zone, reducing its whiff potential. His ideal breaking ball is probably a little slower with a few inches more drop, as Remi Bunikiewicz suggested. He’s capable of getting to that shape — look at the depth and velocity on this swinging strike to James McCann from August:

But Buehler might almost supinate too much to make that breaking ball work. I asked Buehler about that pitch; he told me that he struggles to throw a “bullet slider” with less horizontal movement and more depth.

“I would love to have the Verlander/Cole downer [slider], but with my arm path, it’s hard,” Buehler told me. “I’ve tried. I can make it go left, but the traditional bullet slider is more of a pronator throw. For me, I’m super supinated.”

There is one pitch with the potential to pick up a ton of whiffs to righties — the sweeper. Buehler threw a ton of two-strike sweepers in that Mets start, but it is hard to tell whether that makes sense as a long-term plan. Likely due to environmental conditions, every pitch in that Game 3 in New York moved like crazy; on this pitch to Pete Alonso, Buehler’s sweeper got 27 inches of glove-side break, 12 inches above his season average.

“He’s getting into more count control than earlier in the year, but the two-strike swing-and-miss has not been ideal,” Prior told me. “But what he did last week with the sweeper — I think that’s him at his best.”

Like the curveball, the slowish velocity and huge movement of the sweeper means it’s not a pitch that a hitter would confuse with a fastball. But if Buehler is really spinning 20-inch horizontal break sweepers on the regular, it might not matter: As long as that pitch is near the zone, it’s going to be hard to hit.

To lefties such as Juan Soto, the attack plan is less clear — the book is probably out on full-count middle-middle curveballs. Buehler could eschew a strikeout-based plan to lefties, as Baseball Prospectus‘ Robert Orr suggested, pairing his newfound aggression with heavier cutter usage and seeking weak contact early in at-bats. Or he could give the changeup another chance; while it’s not been a great pitch for him this season, he showed the ability to throw it for whiffs pre-surgery.

Even without the killer fastball from his prime years, Buehler is still super talented. He throws hard and spins the ball with the best of them. In other words, there are plenty of powerful pieces on the board. That’s both a blessing and a curse: There are many paths to checkmate, and Buehler has four days to decide how to design his attack.