The Los Angeles Dodgers have received inconsistent production from their starting rotation for most of the season, with their two top options in Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto finding their stride in recent weeks.
To this point, Walker Buehler has made five rehab starts as he’s worked to both find length in outings, results and a feel for his stuff following a second Tommy John surgery.
Buehler’s most recent start garnered mixed results as he needed 86 pitches to get through four-plus innings. He allowed three earned runs (five total) on seven hits.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts nevertheless believed there were positive takeaways from Buehler’s latest rehab game, per Bill Plunkett of the Southern California News Group:
“The stuff was good. Obviously the results weren’t great,” Roberts said. “But he got into the fifth inning, faced a hitter in the fifth which was good. Pitch count up, which was great. We all knew going in, to kind of evaluate at altitude like that, is very, very difficult.”
Buehler’s spin rates were back in normal ranges, with an uptick on his cutter. But pitching in Albuquerque, a known launch pad for hitters, some of the results can be taken with a grain of salt.
With his pitch count seeming to be in a spot the organization is comfortable with, the last thing is finding a consistent run of results and ultimately getting activated.
Buehler is still struggling to find the strike zone at a consistent rate, but he’s generating enough swing and miss at Triple-A to create some optimism. A huge question mark is his fastball, which has yet to return to old form, and perhaps it isn’t in that realm anymore.
In the final year of his contract with the Dodgers, Buehler is in line to need a solid span of starts to instill hope that he can get big league hitters out with his current arsenal.
Walker Buehler’s next rehab start
As Buehler remains a work in progress, he’s making another rehab start for the Oklahoma City Baseball Club on Tuesday. That’s expected to be his final outing before getting activate to join the Dodgers rotation.
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