ANAHEIM -- Before Monday night’s 9-5 loss to the Angels, Red Sox manager Alex Cora expressed optimism that Walker Buehler — who entered his start with a 10.50 ERA over his past four starts — could find his groove now that he was back in a familiar environment.
“For how bad it looks, I don’t believe he’s that far off,” Cora said. “Hopefully, here in SoCal, probably a few fans will come in, see him ball, get him going.”
But the Buehler that fans at the Big A saw on Monday looked more like the Buehler from last September than the one from last October.
After a huge top of the first inning that saw the Sox open up the game with three runs on five consecutive base hits, Buehler had some run support to work with. Thirty-nine pitches, four walks, a hit by pitch and five Angel runs later, that cushion was gone. And it was still the first inning.
“It’s embarrassing,” Buehler said. “It’s just not who I want to be as a baseball player. I’d rather get whacked around than do that. And somehow, this year I’ve managed to do all the negative things you can.”
The 30-year-old right-hander managed to finish the rest of his outing — four innings on 94 pitches — without allowing another run to come across the plate and three strikeouts. But he also issued a career-high seven walks, which also happens to be the most thrown by a pitcher in a single game this season.
The Red Sox had a rough day across the board on Monday; bad pitching, bad baserunning and bad defense all added up to the kind of loss that has become all too familiar for them in 2025. But Buehler felt like his first inning set his team up for failure, and he wore it postgame.
“You can’t walk seven guys in a Major League Baseball game and expect to be successful,” he said. “I think we keep trying different things and looking at different stuff, or this mix or that mix, and at the end of the day if you don’t execute or throw strikes, you really don’t have a chance.”
There were positives from Buehler in between all the free passes, though. His velocity was up across almost all seven of his pitch types on Monday, with his sweeper up almost two whole mph. He only had three swings-and-misses, but two of them were on his slider, which had a bit more vertical break than his season average.
“I think everything’s fixable in some way,” Buehler said. “I think the ball is coming out of my hand at times really well, and at times I kind of lose sight of what the ball is doing.”
Cora stood by his guy, who signed a one-year, $21.05 million contract with Boston last offseason after recording the final out of the 2024 World Series for the Dodgers.
“We’ll talk about it,” Cora said about whether Buehler’s spot in the rotation is in jeopardy. “But his second and third inning were really good. Velocity was up and the movement pitches were great, but he knows it. We talked a little bit down here. There’s a few things mechanically that he feels like he needs to do better, but he’ll be ready for the next one.”
So what can Buehler — currently posting a career-worst 6.29 ERA in 2025 (not including his eight starts as a rookie in 2017) — do to make more of his outings look like his second and third innings on Monday instead of the first and fourth?
“Largely, I don’t think a whole lot different,” Buehler said. “That’s what’s so difficult and frustrating about this game. The line is so thin.”
It’s a line that Buehler’s tightroped across before. In 2024, he carried a 5.38 ERA through 16 starts in the regular season before flipping a switch and doing his part to carry an injury-riddled Dodgers rotation through the postseason with a 3.60 ERA.
“Obviously last year — struggling all year and figuring it out at the end of the year — illustrates how fine that line is,” he said. “I don’t want to wait til October to figure it out.”