Backed Into a Corner, Dodgers Call On Walker Buehler to Complete Historic Comeback

Years from now, as the greatest comeback team in the history of World Series clinchers gathers for reunions, no one will have to lie, exaggerate or stretch the facts like taffy. The truth is wildly entertaining enough.

The Los Angeles Dodgers really did come from five runs down against a Cy Young Award winner working on a no-hitter. Freddie Freeman really did go all Kirk Gibson on one good leg. Shohei Ohtani did play with one good arm while keeping the other in an invisible sling.  And Dave Roberts really did make critical strategic decisions once by feeling a man’s heartbeat and once by letting his first baseman make the call with a hand signal.

But when the 2024 Dodgers talk about how they won the World Series, especially with a 7–6 win in absolute lollapalooza of a Game 5 Wednesday, they must begin with the story of the team bus that afternoon. Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler strutted onto that bus as it departed for Yankee Stadium and told Andrew Friedman, the team’s president of baseball operations, and Brandon Gomes, the general manager, “Hey, if things get wonky tonight, I’m good to go.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s great,” Friedman said with an eye roll.

“No, seriously,” Buehler said. 

Friedman was thinking to himself, We’ve got a fresh, fully loaded pen. We’re in a good spot. Worst case scenario, if we have to play a Game 7, Walker’s our pitcher.

Buehler had one day of rest after throwing 76 pitches in a Game 3 start, this in his first season back after missing almost two years after undergoing a second Tommy John surgery. He is a free-agent-to-be. In other words, he is the last guy anyone should expect to be cranking his arm voluntarily with such little rest. (His mound counterpart from Game 3, Clarke Schmidt, spent Game 5 in the New York Yankees dugout in sneakers.)

“Well,” Buehler continued, “but what if things get wonky?” 

By the sixth inning, the Dodgers had scored five of the zaniest unearned runs the World Series has ever seen and Roberts, the Dodgers manager, had already called on all six of his high leverage relief pitchers—with nine outs still to go.

At that point Buehler walked into the Dodgers clubhouse and found Friedman, who had been on a telephone trying to find a flight that night to Los Angeles with a lay-flat seat for Game 6 starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, given the likelihood of a Yankees win that would force the series back to Dodger Stadium.

“Um, is this the definition of wonky?” Buehler asked.

Yes. Most definitely yes.

Van Gogh had the south of France. O’Keeffe had New Mexico. Hemingway had Spain. The 2024 Dodgers will always have World Series Game 5. Their last game was their signature game, not only because it clinched their second championship in five seasons but also because it defined their trademark feistiness. When everything went wonky, including a 5–0 deficit to Gerrit Cole and a bullpen quickly running out of pitchers, the Dodgers were at their best.

“In years past we would have lost this game,” Roberts said. “We lost in 2017 in [World Series] Game 7. We were down 4–0 in the second inning. Oh, we just didn’t keep playing, that team. Look what they did now. I’m proud, especially of the little things this team did.”

Friedman has talked about building a “golden era” of Dodgers baseball. Don’t look now, but we are smack in the middle of it already. Over the past 12 years the Dodgers have posted a .613 winning percentage and won two World Series. No other franchise has played that well and won multiple titles over a dozen years.

This Dodgers team, Roberts admitted, trafficked in feistiness unlike the others he has managed. Buehler with a twice-repaired elbow volunteering to walk into the teeth of wonkiness defines that grit. But to find the real beginning of the bus ride story you must go back to Sept. 15 in Atlanta. The Dodgers had lost the first two of four games against the Atlanta Braves. They were 5–7 in their past 12 games. The Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres were making a run at them. The Dodgers had just found out that pitcher Tyler Glasnow was out for the year. Roberts, who generally disdains team meetings, called a meeting.

“The message basically was, I can’t believe more in them than they believe in themselves,” Roberts said.

Then he remembered the cardinal rule of team meetings: always check that day’s starting pitcher before you call a team meeting. The Dodgers’ starter that day was Buehler, who had a 5.95 ERA in 13 starts and was so bad coming back from his Tommy John surgery the Dodgers began to think he might not make their postseason roster.

So Roberts doubled down. He held a private meeting with Buehler.

“Hey, man,” Roberts told Buehler, “I need you to go on a heater. And it has to start now.”

“That’s about the extent of what he said,” Buehler said. “And I did.”

Buehler threw six innings that night and gave up one earned run. In his last seven games he would finish with a 3.45 ERA while finding the swing-and-miss magic on his four-seam fastball. The Dodgers won 9–2 that night. They won the next night, too. They finished the year 22–7 after that meeting.

“This team,” Roberts said, “learned what it takes to fight. It wasn’t always the Dodgers’ reputation. But we learned to be street fighters. It’s been the Padres’ M.O. Their reputation is like the UFC. We started playing like that, like brawlers in a street fight. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of about this team.”

The Padres pushed the Dodgers to the brink of elimination in the National League division series. One more loss would have sent Los Angeles to a fourth straight postseason series loss. The Dodgers responded by winning 8–0 and 2–0 and posting 33 consecutive scoreless innings.

“This group definitely had a special thing about them,” Friedman said. “Obviously, it’s easy to say it sitting here drinking champagne winning the World Series. But it was very palpable when we were down 2–1 in San Diego. It was, We are not going out like this. And there was an edge to the guys calling each other out in good, healthy, productive ways. It was all about making sure that we won the next two games. And it was different.”

Roberts is the renewable energy source of that fight.

“He is relentlessly optimistic,” Friedman said. “Obviously, we went through a lot this year, and a lot of adversity, and his ability during some of our more difficult times to breathe optimism into the group and remind them to look around and see just how talented the guys are that are around them, I think was very significant.”

Privately, the Dodgers liked the World Series matchup against the Yankees. They knew New York cut corners when it came to the finer points of the game. The Yankees did not defend well. Their baserunning was lackluster; the Dodgers scouts wrote up reports about a consistent lack of strong primary leads and fundamental secondary leads. Limit the Yankees’ home runs, the Dodgers knew, and you could out-execute them.

The difference between the two clubs showed at the start. Before Freeman launched the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history to win Game 1, the Yankees facilitated Dodger rallies with stumbling play. Outfielders Alex Verdugo and Juan Soto allowed extra bases by taking poor routes to balls. Second baseman Gleyber Torres carelessly kicked a throw by playing it off the side. A pattern emerged: if the games remained close, the Dodgers would win on a huge edge in fundamentals. 

APSTEIN: Yankees’ Obvious Flaws Surface in Ugly Fashion to End World Series

Freeman homered again in Games 2, 3 and 4, becoming the first player to homer in four straight games to open a series. Roberts punted Game 4, a bullpen game and a 11–4 defeat, by using two rookies, Ben Casparius and Landon Knack, and injury-plagued veterans Daniel Hudson and Brent Honeywell. The plan only made sense if he won Game 5. Nobody expected it would happen in such an outrageous manner.

After Buehler told Friedman and Gomes he was good to go out of the pen in Game 5, Gomes relayed the news to Roberts, who was already at Yankee Stadium.

“Tell him no thanks,” Roberts replied in a text.

When Buehler arrived at the ballpark, Roberts told him, “Dude, we’re not going to use you in a f—ing Game 5.”

That was before wonkiness ensued. Cole and the Yankees led 5–0 in the fifth when Enrique Hernandez lined a fastball for a single, the Dodgers’ first hit. Tommy Edman then hit a routine, weakly hit liner toward Aaron Judge in center field. As Judge put his glove in front of his face to catch it, he averted his eyes toward Hernandez. Why he checked the runner is a mystery. There was no possible advancement. By taking his eye off the ball, Judge dropped it.

Judge is a competent center fielder, and in the previous inning had made a leaping, acrobatic catch at the wall. But at 6’7”, 282 pounds, he should not be playing as much center field as the Yankees ask of him.

The next batter, Will Smith, rolled a grounder to the right of shortstop Anthony Volpe. Hernandez, in serpentine style, smartly skewed his route to disrupt the sightline of Volpe toward third base, where a force play was in order. A distracted Volpe spiked his throw to third baseman Jazz Chisholm. When Cole struck out Gavin Lux, the inning should have been over. But the errors by Judge and Volpe forced Cole to continue to labor.

Cole did strike out the clearly compromised Ohtani, who went 1-for-12 after suffering a subluxation of his shoulder in Game 2. Cole was huffing and puffing, pawing at the dirt with his spikes and trying to find any kind of breaks by often asking for a new baseball. Suspects in dimly lit interrogation rooms look more comfortable than Cole as this inning of endless would-be outs continued.

Mookie Betts tapped a weakly hit grounder toward first base that looked like yet another easy out. But Cole, withered by the length of the inning and the Yankees’ squandering of outs, made no effort to cover first base. Anthony Rizzo, the first baseman, had no one to throw to after catching the spinning baseball. Cole, plain and simple, suffered from a form of battle fatigue that caused a huge mental lapse. A run scored.

“[With] all that he went through in that inning,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said, “he was kind of spent and kind of almost working his way out of it. He just didn’t react quick enough to get over.”

Freeman slashed a two-run single. Teoscar Hernandez blasted a two-run double. The game was tied as Cole, as if sinking in quicksand, labored through 38 pitches over about 20 minutes on the mound. The Yankees gave Los Angeles three extra outs in that inning alone.

New York recovered, however, with a run in the sixth to take a 6–5 lead. In the seventh, Roberts felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Buehler.

“I’ll be in the pen if you need me,” the pitcher told Roberts.

“And he had his game face on,” Roberts said. “So, I was like, ‘Oh f–.’ And then you’re looking at counting outs and who we got available. And it was a little bit of that Clayton Kershaw [NLDS] Game 5 in D.C. And I guarantee that was on his mind, right?”

“Hey, Walker is going to the pen,” Roberts told pitching coach Mark Prior.

A few minutes later Prior called Buehler on the bullpen phone.

“How do you feel? Did you throw today?” Prior asked.

“Yeah,” Buehler said. “I feel good.”

“I lied,” Buehler said. “I hadn’t thrown yet.”

Only two days earlier Buehler had thrown 76 pitches to shut out the Yankees over five innings. That game alone was a testament to his willpower. The night before his start he canceled a dinner with family and friends because he was feeling awful with flu-like symptoms.

“He was like, ‘I’m staying in bed,’” said his father, Tony. “He was sick as a dog.”

By the seventh inning of Game 5, Roberts knew he might need to take up Buehler on his offer to pitch. He brought in Blake Treinen, his last available high leverage reliever, in the sixth and pushed him back out for the seventh and eighth.

The Dodgers scored two in the eighth to take a 7–6 lead, thanks to more ugly baseball by New York. Reliever Tommy Kahnle retired none of three batters he faced: two singles and a four-pitch walk. Gavin Lux tied the game with a sacrifice fly off Luke Weaver and Betts put Los Angeles ahead with another sacrifice fly.

The Dodgers needed six outs for the title, but Roberts had no known path to get there. Predictably, Treinen wobbled from fatigue. The Yankees put runners at first and second in the eighth with one out and Giancarlo Stanton coming up. Roberts bounded from the dugout to check on his pitcher.

Roberts put his hand on Treinen’s chest.

“I wanted to feel his heart,” Roberts said. “I wanted to look in his eyes and see. And I wanted him to tell me he had more in the tank.”

“Hey, dude, how are you feeling?” he asked Treinen.

“I got you,” Treinen replied. “I want him.”

Roberts returned to the dugout. On the next pitch, Treinen retired Stanton on a pop-up. Two outs. Rizzo was due next. Roberts stood up and began to lurch toward the mound. He had a weary Daniel Hudson ready to face Rizzo.

Suddenly, Roberts looked across the field and Freeman, his first baseman, was staring right at him. Freeman was slowly pushing both hands toward the ground, the universal symbol indicating “stand down.”

“He’s like, ‘Let him go,’” Roberts said. “And I go, I’m gonna stand down.”

Treinen somehow had enough left in his tank to strike out Rizzo. Roberts sent word to the bullpen that Buehler had the ninth. Friedman saw him warming.

“This is crazy,” Friedman said aloud. “It is wonky. But Walker is such a competitor that it’s not shocking to see. 

“I think a lot is going to be written about what Blake did. But it won’t do it justice. Those guys are free agents, Blake and Walker. For them to do what they did, the way they put their teammates up on a pedestal, the way they competed and laid it all out there for their teammates, for the fans in Los Angeles, for Dodger Nation, I just don’t think enough is going to be written and said about it.”

Buehler pitched a 1-2-3 ninth.

“I actually felt really good out there,” he said. “I was pretty surprised. I didn’t do so much with my elbow. As weird as it sounds, it’s gotten more black and white after every surgery.  You know, he can do it, or he can’t.”

 The ball did not leave the infield. Ten of his 16 pitches were curveballs, including the last one, a swinging strike three from Verdugo.

“This is the only reason I play, for games like this,” Buehler said. “The whole year—the offseason, spring training, the regular season – it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters, but not like these games. To win championships is why I play. It’s the best feeling in the world. I live for this.”

Buehler has allowed only one run in 19 World Series innings. Only Madison Bumgarner (0.25) and Jack Billingham (0.36) have a lower World Series ERA than Buehler (0.47) among the 177 pitchers with at least 19 innings in the Fall Classic.

As soon as Buehler fanned Verdugo, the righthander turned to his dugout on the third base side and threw his hands out to the side and let his face remain calm as the joy and bedlam erupted around him. He had the pose of Look this and behold! My work is done.

Later, in the clubhouse, Buehler was asked if this was his best day in baseball.

“Yeah, I think so,” he replied. “Two days ago was pretty fun, too.”

Hernandez then grabbed him around the neck and shouted at Buehler, “Everybody is going to watch this highlight. You’re going to be on the mound getting the last out of the World Series for the rest of your f—ing life.

“For the rest of your life you’re going to be the guy who got the last out of the World Series. On the mound on one day rest! Who the f— else, huh? Walker, thank you, man.”

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