The Red Sox' rotation reshaping continued Monday as Boston and righthander Walker Buehler agreed to a one-year deal worth $21.05 million.
Here are five things to know about Buehler, who had spent his entire career with the Dodgers before this move to Boston.
Buehler was one of top pitching prospects in baseball when he reached the majors with a September call-up in 2017, and he quickly blossomed into one of the league's best starters.
The Vanderbilt product posted a 2.62 ERA in 137 ⅓ innings in his first full season, finishing third in rookie of the year voting behind nascent superstars Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto. He followed that up with an All-Star campaign in 2019, and after a slight down campaign in the COVID-affected 2020 season, Buehler posted the best year of his career in 2021.
Buehler finished fourth in Cy Young voting -- and had a very strong case to win it -- after going 16-4 with a 2.47 ERA as the ace of a Dodgers team that won 106 games.
Over those four seasons from 2018-2021, Buehler was a combined 39-13 while posting a 2.82 ERA over 564 innings of work. The only pitchers with as many innings and a better ERA over that span were Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer.
While his individual performance has come down from his 2018-2021 peak, Buehler is coming off the high point of his career with a second World Series title with the Dodgers.
Buehler was called upon to make his first career save in Game 5 of the World Series and delivered, throwing a clean inning and striking out two batters to close out the Yankees just two days after he'd thrown five scoreless innings to win Game 3.
While Los Angeles has had its fair share of postseason letdowns over the last decade, Buehler often delivered in October. The righthander has made four appearances and thrown 19 innings across the Dodgers' three World Series runs, allowing just one earned run on five hits and striking out 24 batters.
Like many of baseball's best fireballers, the chase for velocity caught up with Buehler in 2022 as he had to undergo Tommy John surgery for the second time (he also did so soon after he was drafted in 2015).
The surgery sidelined him for much of 2022 and all of 2023, and his return to the mound in 2024 was often rocky. He had outings where he looked back to his best (six shutout innings in his third game back on May 18) and others that were disastrous (seven earned runs in four innings against the lowly Rockies on June 18, after which he didn't pitch for the Dodgers for two months) en route to a 1-6 record with a 5.38 ERA.
But for all his regular-season struggles returning from injury, Buehler sparkled again in the playoffs. After a rough first outing against the Padres in the NLDS, he was untouchable the rest of the way, throwing 10 scoreless innings over three appearances, striking out 13 batters and allowing just five hits.
Buehler hails from Lexington, Ky., and is a big fan of horse racing. Buehler grew up attending races in the "Horse Capital of the World" and is a minority owner of Authentic, the thoroughbred who won the Kentucky Derby and the Breeders' Cup Classic in 2020.
"I was the weird kid that got the BloodHorse, the Thoroughbred Times to my house," Buehler said in 2023. "I read an Andy Beyer book when I was a kid, so I kind of got into it that way. I was pretty good picking horses when I was a kid. ... I think growing up [in Kentucky], it's part of life and something that all of us kind of embrace and enjoy."
It should come as no surprise that Buehler's heard plenty of jokes about his last name, most often when people quote the roll call scene from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."
Buehler has leaned into the jokes, sporting the @buehlersdayoff handle on Twitter and wearing the nickname "Ferris" on the back of his uniform for Players Weekend in 2018.
Buehler didn't pitch in the jersey, however, as he wasn't scheduled to start over that weekend -- those were his days off.