Coming off his best start post-Tommy John surgery, the arrow was pointing up for Walker Buehler heading into Saturday's tilt in Cincinnati. Things didn't go quite as smooth, though, as he surrendered three earned runs over 5.2 innings of work in a 3-1 loss for the Dodgers.
After a start in which he didn't allow a run and only allowed one hard hit ball, Buehler gave up six of the latter against the Reds. FanGraphs Hard% metric had him at 56.3, which is his second highest. The Padres touched him for a 61.5 Hard% back on May 12th.
For Buehler, the primary issue seems to be that he lived in the zone much too much. The Zone% came in at 53.8 percent, which is a five percent jump off his last start. Reds hitters made contact almost 91 percent of the time on pitches inside the strike zone.
The issue is that when you're living in the zone like that, it doesn't compel opposing hitters to whiff at the stuff outside the strike zone. Throwing strikes is important, but living outside the zone to an extent is a crucial element. The Reds only swung at 21 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, the lowest figure Buehler has generated to date. They had a whiff rate of just 4.4 percent.
That's a team that strikes out at the third-highest rate in the league and is only 23rd in the league in contact. So for Buehler to surrender that level of contact without getting them to move on pitches outside the zone speaks to the problem with living in the zone to that extent.
Not that Buehler cost them that game in any way. The Dodgers were only able to muster a single run against a very sharp Hunter Greene. But fair or not, when the offense is going in such a way as the Dodgers are right now, you have to be nearly perfect. Buehler simply lived in the zone a bit too much, and the slumping offense couldn't compensate.
That's just the way things sometimes go in baseball, even for the Los Angeles Dodgers.