Walker Buehler Knows How to Win Championships—and Especially How to Celebrate Them

Walker Buehler was looking for friends. What else do you do when, mere hours after leading the Los Angeles Dodgers to their first championship in a full season since 1988, you find yourself on a cross-country flight from the Bronx back to LA? But as Buehler, the pitcher who earned the save in the historic victory (following a win in Game 3), learned, his teammates can’t quite hang like the fun-loving, free-wheeling 30-year-old from Kentucky.

“We got home at 7:00 am LA time,” he recalled over Zoom recently, sitting in front of a home bar healthily stocked with bourbon. “I think I was the only person on the plane that didn't sleep a wink. I was walking around checking, seeing who was awake. I made it no sleep until 8:00 p.m the next night. So I had a pretty good run.”

That statement is true in more ways than one. After a slight hiccup in San Diego during his first game of the postseason, Buehler was absolute nails. He blanked the Mets in his lone start of the National League Championship Series, then came back with five shutout innings in Game 3 of the World Series. Just two nights later, with the Dodgers running short on pitchers, he got the final three outs of the clinching game, turning Yankee Stadium into a library in the process. “It got quiet in there,” Buehler said with a sly grin. “I think the coolest aspect of Yankee Stadium is that everyone's not on top of you. There's this size to it and everyone's off of you a little bit, and that's part of what makes it a really cool ballpark to play in. But when it gets quiet, it gets real big in there, and kind of airy.”

The way his 2024 campaign unfolded, Buehler was far from an obvious candidate to get the biggest outs of the year. By nearly every metric, the righthander had the worst season of his (otherwise mostly sterling) eight-year career. He had trouble finding the strike zone, struggled to keep the ball in the yard, and his ERA swelled. “Dogshit” is how he described it after the fact on Mookie Betts’ podcast, recorded at the star outfielder’s sprawling SoCal mansion the night of the championship parade. (Because Buehler and the Dodgers’ last title came in 2020, this was his first parade.) But after taking the L in San Diego—surrendering six runs in one inning, putting the Dodgers in a 2-1 hole in the best-of-five series—Buehler let out some steam, and that seemed to solve everything.

“That one inning was about as weird an inning as I've ever had in my career, let alone in the playoffs,” he said. “To do it in that environment in San Diego—big rivalry, big talented teams—it just sucked. I launched something in the dugout there and got a little upset, and things started going better after that. I think that San Diego game was a microcosm of the season: come out and struggle a little bit, and then figure it out at the end.”

The end—which came not only after a challenging season but also the second Tommy John surgery of his career—can be a little jarring for any ballplayer. Over the course of a season, baseball is all-consuming, what with its 162-game schedule and crisscross travel. Once the buzz wore off, the parade hit the finish line, and the rager at Mookie’s came to an end, Buehler found himself in unfamiliar territory. When he struck out Alex Verdugo to end Game 5, he not only secured the Dodgers’ eighth World Series trophy, he also officially became a free agent for the first time. And with the team’s recent signing of stud pitcher Blake Snell, the writing is on the wall: Buehler’s time in Dodger blue is likely coming to an end. As he geared up for October, the weight of each postseason start—plus that of a subpar regular season, and then the pressure of looming free agency—sat on his shoulders like a silverback gorilla. No problem at all for the man nicknamed “Buehtane,” who prefers opening beer bottles with his teeth.

“I've talked in the past about the weight of an organization being on your back as something that I enjoy a lot,” he calmly told me. “That, mixed with a little bit of fear of having failed so much, makes that even feel a little bit bigger. That weight has been something that I've always enjoyed.” Virtually every professional athlete who’s enjoyed any modicum of success will tell you that pressure means nothing to them. But when you hear Buehler say it, especially after what he did on baseball’s grandest stage, it comes across as even more genuine. Plus, in classic Buehler fashion, he has a self-deprecating sense of humor about it.

“Honestly, I've been really, notoriously bad out of the bullpen my whole career,” he chuckled. (His clincher was his first-ever relief appearance in the playoffs.) “I think the one thing that I had now that I used to never have is, I was completely okay with losing that game. I knew that the sun would come up tomorrow, and I had just been through a tough year. So for me, I think that not having fear of losing let me have a little bit more success than I had in the past.” As for his immediate celebration on the mound—a Gladiator-esque, “Are you not entertained?” gesture to the despondent crowd—he admitted to planning it out a little bit. Once his teammates reached him for the traditional championship mob, his natural reaction apparently freaked some people out. “I kept making this face, I was screaming when everyone was around me. My wife said that was a little scary. I wish I could tell you it was something cool that I was yelling, but I was just screaming, ‘What?’ I don't know why.”

Buehler strikes a pose after getting the final out of the 2024 World Series Daniel Shirey/Getty Images

The ensuing party was less of a challenge for Buehler, who says he’s gotten better at the champagne spray, but recently ditched the protective ski goggles at the behest of Clayton Kershaw. With the World Series pitting the country’s two biggest markets against each other, plus the added attention from Japanese reporters covering Shohei Ohtani, the whole affair was quite media-heavy. Once everyone got their necessary quotes, Buehler started playing bouncer. “At one point I was just yelling, ‘If you have a microphone, you need to get out of here,’ with a little bit of colorful language,” he said. At the parade, where teammate Jack Flaherty got virally lost in the sauce, Buehler implemented a sound strategy. “I have to do beer or the seltzer kind of stuff or else I'll be an absolute menace to society at some point,” he said with equanimity. “We were doing the beer bongs. My wife and I have that pretty locked down.”

Buehler is now facing a momentous winter, full of uncertainty about how much money he’ll make and which team he’ll be making it for. It obviously helps that he enters it as a two-time champion, and one last seen throwing ten straight scoreless postseason innings with 13 strikeouts (including the series ender, which you can expect to be played during every 2024 Dodgers highlight reel). He spent the early days of his offseason hosting his fifth annual charity golf tournament for the Buehler Family Foundation, which provides resources for first responders in his hometown of Lexington, KY. He only just started his throwing program, and with the shortened down period that comes from playing deep into autumn, Buehler acknowledged that things feel a little odd.

“To wake up and not have anything to do, but also to have won your last game, is something that everyone wants,” he said. “And when you do it, it's just a little weird. When you lose the last game, there's a couple days of like, I got to go figure out how to get better to win the last game.” But when you win the whole damn thing? “All this stuff's going on and there's a point where you're like, Okay, now it's next season already.”