This story was excerpted from AJ Cassavell's Padres Beat newsletter. MLB.com content producer Jacob Gurvis pinch-hit for this edition To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
Walker Buehler may never recapture his 2021 form, when he finished fourth in the National League Cy Young race after posting a 16-4 record with a 2.47 ERA and 212 strikeouts.
But in his quest for a career renaissance, the 31-year-old righty is giving plenty of reasons for optimism.
Buehler tossed five innings of one-run ball in the Padres’ 5-2 win over the Orioles in Baltimore on Sunday, his first win since May 16 in Seattle. Buehler struck out five, walked none and gave up just one run, a solo homer.
It was a continuation of a recent run of dominance from the former first-round pick, who lowered his season ERA to 4.14. Over his past seven starts, Buehler owns a 2.92 ERA with 29 punchouts in 37 innings and only 10 walks (four of which came in one outing).
He’s been even better in June, with a 1.72 ERA and 15 K’s through three starts.
In Sunday’s outing, Buehler induced 10 whiffs on 46 swings, while seeing improved velocity on six of his seven pitches. His cutter, which averaged 91 mph -- 0.9 mph above his season average -- accounted for two of his strikeouts, including a nasty 89.7 mph offering to get Adley Rutschman looking in a key spot in the fifth.
"I think that cutter has become more and more my signature pitch,” Buehler said. “[I] made a good [pitch in] a big spot for me and the offense took care of the rest.”
Buehler’s strikeout and walk numbers were each moving in the wrong direction since he’d returned from his second Tommy John surgery after missing the 2023 season. Last year, his walk rate spiked to 10.6%, more than double what it had been earlier in his career (5% in 2019).
At the same time, his strikeout rate had dipped to 16.3%, which put him in the bottom 9% of MLB pitchers. His K% hovered between 26-29% for the first five years of his career.
So far in 2026, those trends have begun to return to their pre-2024 norms for Buehler. His strikeout rate is back around 20%, while his walk rate has dropped back to single-digits. After walking north of four batters per nine innings in '25, it’s down below three now. These numbers aren’t elite, but they’re much better.
With Nick Pivetta, Joe Musgrove, Matt Waldron and Germán Márquez all sidelined with injuries -- not to mention Yu Darvish, who is out for the year -- Buehler’s continued progress would be a boon for the Padres.
San Diego entered Monday with a 4.58 combined ERA from its starters, which ranks 22nd in baseball. Fellow veteran Lucas Giolito has seen mixed results in his first five starts since joining the Padres last month, but he’s also looked better of late. The 31-year-old, who was a teammate of Buehler’s with the '25 Red Sox, has allowed three earned runs with eight strikeouts across eight innings in June.
Michael King, who re-signed with the Padres over the winter, has held down the fort as the staff’s ace, with a 3.46 ERA and 72 strikeouts through his first 14 starts.
Pivetta and Musgrove aren’t expected back until the second half, while Márquez and Waldron (who may return as a reliever) are a bit ahead of them. There’s plenty of baseball left -- 92 games to be exact. The Padres are currently seven games back of the Dodgers in the NL West and hold the third NL Wild Card spot.
But if the Padres plan to play deep into October, they’ll need their starting staff to continue stepping up. And with a full starting five on the IL, it’s role players like Buehler who hold the keys to that success.