Walker Buehler Is Back. Sort Of.

About a month ago, the Padres went shopping over the long weekend and landed a bunch of old guys who seemed pretty washed. I was glib in my appraisal of those moves, suggesting that they’d only work out if A.J. Preller had a time machine.

The Padres live in a perpetual state of roster turnover, which occasionally leaves gaps. That’s how you end up with no. 4 starter Germán Márquez, or platoon first baseman Nick Castellanos. But those two are on major league deals; they were always likely to make the roster in some capacity, regardless of how you feel about those late-2010s stalwarts now.

But nothing so concrete was promised to Walker Buehler, who came to camp in Peoria on a minor league deal with a non-roster invite.

The Padres were always going to have at least a temporary need for pitching; Buehler would probably not have signed in San Diego if he didn’t have at least a remote chance of breaking camp with the major league team. Well, we already knew Yu Darvish was out with a torn UCL, and that Griffin Canning was going to need time to recover fully from a ruptured Achilles tendon.

Now, the Padres are bringing back Joe Musgrove cautiously from his own torn UCL, which required Tommy John surgery in October 2024. That leaves one rotation spot open, and as of Monday, Buehler is the frontrunner for it.

That’s a pretty special achievement. The most common outcome for a non-roster invitee is to either opt out of his deal (if he has that choice) or to get demoted to the minors. Each year, only a handful of NRIs make it to Opening Day with the team that signed them, mostly as bench players and relief depth; Buehler is the only NRI currently in a major league rotation spot on RosterResource.

Granted, Buehler is not your garden variety NRI. He was bad last year: 4.93 ERA in 126 innings, with a 16.3% walk rate and 10.8% strikeout rate. That combination of strikeout and walk rate hasn’t been acceptable since the 1990s. But he was better than Márquez, who got a major league deal.

Buehler is also a two-time All-Star and two-time World Series champion who made more than $21 million last year. Rather than tie himself to one team for just over the league minimum, he could afford to take a non-guaranteed deal to find the best spot for a bounce-back season.

On Monday, Buehler made his most emphatic case for a spot in the San Diego rotation, as he struck out seven in five scoreless innings at the front end of a 3-1 win over the Giants. Buehler allowed just five baserunners and got 11 whiffs on 32 swings.

If that had been a regular-season performance, I’d be standing on the roof of my car with a bullhorn proclaiming Buehler to be back, but you have to take the Cactus League for what it’s worth. For example, the lineup Buehler faced was without Luis Arraez, who was busy winning the World Baseball Classic. He also avoided Rafael Devers, Willy Adames, and Matt Chapman — so, like, probably San Francisco’s four best hitters.

Two of those seven strikeouts came against Bryce Eldridge, who is seeing ghosts right now. Two more came against Drew Gilbert, who’s probably going to start the season in Triple-A. So let’s not get out over our skis. How good is Buehler, really? What, if anything, has changed since last year?

To shed some light on that question, I’ve compiled some vital stats on his various pitches, comparing his 2026 spring training numbers to last year’s regular-season numbers, as well as his combined regular-season and playoff numbers from 2021, his last elite season.

As you can see, Buehler isn’t an easy fix. Some pitchers can learn the trendy new pitch and wake up a new man; not Buehler. You can’t teach him a cutter; he’s always thrown one. You can’t teach him a sinker; he’s always thrown one. The same with a sweeper. He’s a splitter away from being a 2/3 scale model of Darvish.

When Buehler was contending for the Cy Young Award, his fastball was in the 95-mph range routinely, and he threw it 44.5% of the time. Last year, it was more than a mile an hour slower, and he used it a quarter of the time. The difference is actually more stark; back in 2021, the average four-seamer velo was 94.1 mph and the average two-seamer velo was 93.3. In 2025, those numbers were 95.0 mph and 94.1 mph, respectively. So Buehler went from above-average fastball velocity to below average despite only losing one mile per hour.

More concerning, Buehler’s fastball used to have more rise and some cutter action; now it’s lost not only that unusual movement profile, but also 200 rpm of spin. I’d throw fewer four-seamers, too.

The velocity numbers aren’t especially encouraging, but I wouldn’t be too worried; we’re still a week from the start of the regular season, and Buehler’s fastballs were averaging about 93 mph in his start against the Giants. If you’re more visually minded, here’s an illustration of his pitch movement from last year.

This is from the catcher’s POV, so it’s backwards from the radar graph at the top of a Baseball Savant page. Below is what Buehler has done in spring training.

The difference in sheer volume of pitches makes it a little tough to draw a comparison, but you can see he’s getting less arm-side movement on his four-seamer, and especially his changeup, and he’s tightened up his sweeper, giving it less movement in both axes, but especially vertically.

Both of those changes could be good; Buehler’s problem both in 2024 and 2025 was that his four-seamer got clobbered, and tweaking his changeup could keep hitters from posting a .400 wOBA against his heater.

The other thing that might just be an artifact of spring training is the pitch usage. Last season, Buehler’s most common pitch was the aforementioned four-seamer, at 25.3%; his least used pitch was the sweeper, at 6.7%. So far this spring, he’s thrown all seven of his pitches at least 12.0% of the time, but none more than 16.7% of the time.

Occam’s Razor says that’s just a veteran with a big arsenal treating Cactus League games like glorified practices — which they are, to some extent. He’s throwing everything to get all seven pitches dialed in, and the results are what they are.

But he was already approaching kitchen sink territory in 2025; Buehler, once that precocious power righty, might have to find success after his second Tommy John surgery as a junkballer. Which is better, I guess, than not being able to adapt and survive at all.