Walker Buehler and the Journey of Rehab

Sorry I haven’t been writing. I’m going through my own version of writer’s block where I think aloud some thoughts, I draft up a couple sentences, it reads like shit and I hate myself and I quit. Maybe once week I open up my draft for Clockwork’s Part 3 and I just can’t make myself finish it.

So just indulge me for a second as I continue to write about things you probably don’t care about. Let me write about some baseball. I promise it won’t be that long and I’ll try to relate this to trading at some point.

For you non-baseball watchers, this guy’s name is Walker Buehler. He’s a starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers–my favorite sports team in the entire world. He wears really tight pants, he’s a bit of a goof, and he’s really good at baseball.

Scratch that.

He used to be really good at baseball. Now he’s not.¹‘Good’ in this context means above average MLB player which would be above 2 WAR or wins above replacement level. Obviously he’s still ‘Good’ at baseball in the sense that he’s in MLB whereas 0.1% of everyone who plays high school ball ever makes that far

Here’s the thing about pre-2022 Walker Buehler. This guy had one of the best four seam fastballs I’ve ever seen from a Dodgers right-handed pitcher. He could just spam his heater right down the pipe, and still get whiffs. He went on record saying didn’t care about walking hitters. He was that confident that, back against the wall, he could get out of any tough spots with the four-seamer. From 2018 to 2021, Walker Buehler’s cumulative wFA–which is Fangraph’s Fastball runs above average–ranked 4th among all 130 qualified pitchers. Only Gerrit Cole, Jacob DeGrom, and Max Scherzer rated higher in wFA–three pitchers with a combined six Cy Young awards among them. We thought that one day, Walker Buehler would have a Cy Young of his own.

Flashback to the 2020 MLB post-season. It’s game 6 of the NLCS and the Dodgers, down 2-3 in the series, are in an elimination game against the Atlanta Braves. Win or go home. Walker Buehler, defending an early 3-0 lead, is now facing a bases loaded, zero out jam after allowing three straight singles. The median outcome of a bases loaded, zero out jam is usually two runs. You can lose a game right here if it blows up on you for the worst.

Me? I’m bracing for that worst. Their best hitter is up and he could hit a grand slam and we’ll go from up 3-0 to down 3-4. The Dodgers are gonna Dodger this… again. I’d be happy if we just gave up one run.

Walker Buehler? He’s not phased by the moment and he’s feeling a little stingey. He doesn’t want to give up any runs at all.

Austin Riley, bases loaded, no outs. Strikeout swinging on a fastball. 99mph.

Nick Markakis, bases loaded, one out. Strikeout looking on a fastball. 100mph.

Christian Pache, bases loaded, two outs. Groundout to short on a breaking ball. Inning over, no runs allowed.

At the start of the inning when he allowed 3 straight hits, Walker was trying to keep a balanced pitch mix with some cutters, some curveballs… and it didn’t seem to work. Back against the wall, his mindset became fuck this, I’m just going to spam my best pitch.

Ten straight four-steam fastballs. They knew what was coming and they couldn’t hit it.

Watch this video from the 17 second mark to the 1 minute mark and you’ll see a pitcher as mentally tough as anyone out there.

This is what an Ace looks like. – Joe Buck

I remember thinking at that moment… Wow. This guy can just throw that four seamer through ANYONE. He does not care. This inning is prime Walker in a nutshell: mentally tough power pitcher. Dodgers would win this game, win game 7 and the NLCS, and then win their first World Series championship since 1988. Walker Buehler. Ace pitcher.

We all loved him. We all thought he would be the guy to take the Dodgers Ace mantle from the aging Clayton Kershaw going into the 2020’s. He finished 4th the next year in the 2021 Cy Young voting.

And then… sports happened

Injuries. In 2022, Walker Buehler tears the UCL in the elbow and now he needs Tommy John surgery. It’s the second TJ surgery in his young career.

He doesn’t pitch for almost two years. For those unfamiliar with the rehab process from TJ surgery, it’s just a brutal mental toll for any competitor because you don’t pitch a real game that counts for almost two years. You’re just preparing to do so. It’s physical therapy and strength/conditioning for 3-6 months. Then you enter a throwing program after that–long toss, then throwing off the mound, then bullpen sessions. Then after at least a year, it’s a return to competitive play–simulated games and then minor league games where you throw a couple innings at most. Often in these rehab games, you just throw to throw and the most important success metric is not feeling pain the next day. Some 29 year old career minor leaguer will hit a 450-ft bomb off your lifeless meatball of a pitch and you just have to take it and see it as part of the process. It takes an absurd amount of patience and trust in the process.

Can I relate this tangentially to trading now? Ok I’ll start now. In 2023, I was going through my worst trading year and I started working with a well-known psychologist who works with traders. I took a long time off and I just wanted to get back into the swing of things. Trade small. Take plays that make sense. Don’t press too hard and worry about PnL. Because he knew I was a baseball fan, he made the analogy that the next month would be like rehab. You’re in the minors and you’re just trying to work out the fastball and see how it feels. It doesn’t count yet. Don’t try to chase the feeling of being all the way back.

Ok back to baseball. Now it’s 2024 and Walker Buehler makes his long-awaited comeback after all that rigorous and intense rehab. He put in so much freakin work, he’s got to be an ace again right?!

Well it doesn’t work that way.

14 starts. 5.54 ERA. Negative -1.2 WAR.

Not an ace. Not good at baseball anymore.

That once legendary four seam fastball that could make elite hitters look stupid? An astoundingly bad wFA of -9.6 in 2024, ranking 227th among all 236 pitchers that have logged a minium of 60 innings pitched. This is what it looks like when your best weapon becomes your biggest liability.

His arm seems live and the velocity readings, still sitting around 94-95mph, suggest he isn’t that far off from his peak but that tiny margin for error can mean everything. His command is also way off. When he tries to rely on secondary pitches, he has no idea where they will go. Every single start is brutal to watch. Overthrowing and trying to chase the special stuff he once had, only to miss the strike zone badly. Trying to get a heater by a top hitter like the old days and now seeing it donged out of the park. He’s not the same guy anymore. It’s depressing. It reminds me of my own career mortality. How success can be so easy for forever and then it’s just gone, just like that, and you wonder what was ever in your control in the first place. You wonder… will I ever get it back? Or is it over and I have to make my peace with it?

Buehler will be a free agent in the offseason and if you ask me, his chances of resigning with the Dodgers aren’t very high. Writing all of this is my way, as a baseball fan, to cope with the loss of ‘Walker Buehler, Ace Pitcher’.

Reinvention?

I hope he proves me wrong. I do think he can at least find a way to make a steady living as a solid #3 type pitcher but he’s going to have to reinvent himself a bit. Maybe he has to create a new pitch or find a low-fastball pitch mix. Maybe it takes a mental acceptance that he’s now more of a finesse pitcher and now he’ll have to do more with less. I’m not sure. It might take multiple seasons with multiple teams just to get there.

I’m in the middle of my own reinvention and rehabilitation. Unfortunately there’s no follow-by-numbers script for a trader like there is for a pitcher where he goes through 3 different stages of recovery with an entire medical team and coaching staff around him.

I started trading lightly again at the of August. I’ve gone through several different iterations of what I think Peter 2.0 trader will be. I’ll give you a few instances:

• Peter To, writer and day trader!²yeahhh and then I stopped writing because I’m a little bitch
• Peter To, research oriented swing trader
• Peter To, technical momentum oriented swing trader
• Peter To, long term investor in public/private markets
• Peter To, day trader of only A+ setups that occur 10x a year
• Peter To, day trader of liquid in-play large caps
• some mix of the above

Nothing really sticks. I had a break even month where half of the time, I didn’t do shit and would just watch TV all day. I had some mild losses that I would take almost too dishearteningly and let it discourage me. For example, I had a research based biotech position in my IRA that blew up on me about a week ago. I was sized small but just eating that loss made me feel like a fraud. WTF am I doing try to make my money that way? I’m just LARP-ing as the type of trader I am not. But if I’m going to reinvent myself, don’t I need just a smidgen more patience to tinker and give myself some room for mistakes? Don’t I need to show some heart and commitment? What is the correct conclusion here?

Going back to 2023 with that psychology and that cute little rehab analogy we worked out, let me tell you how it worked out. I had a couple days trading small and then I let it rip hard and took some fat losses before I was clearly ready. I overthrew my fastball and the market went yard on me.

Whatever I choose, I’d have to put the work and commit to it and I’ll admit I haven’t done that. I feel hopelessly checked out whenever I trade. I’m easily distracted. I have very little ‘dawg’ in my trading… in the sense that I don’t want to compete for the best fills or watch the market all day or scalp way back to positive–the things I used to feel compelled to do. I want it to be easy, as if I deserve it for all the years I put in.

I think about the arduous process of a pitcher’s rehab. Just throwing and throwing and throwing and hyper focusing on your spots and your spin and your release and all those little details– and then repeating it over and over and waiting for it to feel like it used to. The sleepness of nights of not knowing whether it will ever feel the same. It’s a feeling I dealt with periodically for the first ten years of my trading career. But right now, it’s almost as if I can’t deal with that at the juncture of my life and now I can ‘choose’ to avoid these existential dreads because I have already made the money and had the success. So I am choosing exactly that–avoidance of commitment, avoidance of pain. Maybe that’s my eventual retirement tagline–I don’t want to do it anymore.

Or I can’t do it anymore. Not sure there’s any difference.