A year certainly has made a lot of difference in the baseball career of Walker Buehler.
At this time last season, Buehler was riding high off his second World Series championship, even if he hadn’t had the regular season he wanted in 2024 with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and had just inked a one-year, $21 million “prove it” deal with the Boston Red Sox.
Buehler was unable to prove much of anything, as it turned out. After putting up a 5.45 ERA in his 23 appearances with the Red Sox, being released, and finishing out the season with just three appearances with the Philadelphia Phillies, the two-time All-Star now has to start over from all the way at the bottom of the baseball totem pole.
On Monday, Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the San Diego Padres had inked Buehler to a minor-league contract with an invite to major league spring training. The 31-year-old will enter a crowded rotation competition for a Padres team hoping to unseat the team that Buehler spent the first seven years of his career starring for just to the north.
Once a first-round pick for the Dodgers in 2015, Buehler still has very strong lifetime stats — a 57-29 regular-season record with a 3.52 ERA, and a 3.04 postseason ERA, including just one earned run allowed in 19 innings of World Series competition.
Though Buehler closed the season strong with the Phillies, with one earned run allowed in 13 2/3 innings, his stuff was so lackluster with the Red Sox for most of last season, and his accuracy so diminished, that it’s not altogether a shock that Buehler couldn’t land a major league deal.
Now, though, Buehler has something to prove. And even if the Dodgers were proven right in hindsight for not giving him the qualifying offer after his standout performance in the World Series in 2024, he can still use that slight as motivation if and when he faces his former team this season.
More MLB: Yankees’ Aaron Judge Reveals Plan to Be Even More Dominant in 2026