TORONTO – He made his mark by never missing his turn. By being ready when needed and brilliant when necessary.
Mark Buehrle became a full-time starter with the Chicago White Sox out of spring training in 2001 and made every scheduled for the next 15 years.
So imagine what it’s like for Buehrle this October as for the first time in his career his team is playing games and he’s not part of any of them.
Buehrle doesn’t have to imagine it. He knows.
“It sucks,” was his brief assessment of being left off the Toronto Blue Jays ALDS roster and now the ALCS roster. His chances of pitching again this season rely almost completely on someone else suffering a setback, either physically or in terms of performance. Given retirement is a possibility, his career might already be over.
It’s not a thought he’s comfortable entertaining although he’ll be prepared.
“I’m playing catch every couple of days, I’m still working out,” he says. “I’m doing stuff and everything I can do to get ready like I was getting ready to pitch.
“Hopefully we can win this round, and I don’t want to be put on for the next round because that means someone gets hurt. But if something happens and we make it to the World Series and someone’s not pitching good or they want to switch things up for some reason and I’m the guy they want to put on there, I’ll be ready to go.”
Even for a guy who’s won a World Series and pitched two no-hitters, including a perfect game, Buehrle’s consistency is his most notable achievement. While plenty has been made about the veteran left-hander’s streak of 14 consecutive seasons with 200-innings pitched – a mark he shares with four others, all Hall-of-Famers – Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos always thought the fact that he’d never missed a start over all those years was even more remarkable.
And now he’s not just missing one start, he’s missing all of them.
It’s not the storybook ending you might wish on a guy who has earned a reputation as consummate professional and a treasured teammate. And not one you might have seen coming.
He was 5-1 in June and July with an ERA under 2.00 over 10 starts. In a season that has featured a lot of pitchers getting hot, Buehrle’s roll went largely unnoticed because the Blue Jays were struggling even as he was thriving. But he was big reason they were able to crawl back from 23-30 and get back to .500 by the end of July and in a position where the Blue Jays felt they had a shot at pushing for a playoff spot when they went on their season-shaping shopping spree at the trade deadline.
But a sore shoulder sapped his already suspect velocity and the 36-year-old wavered badly down the stretch, even as the Blue Jays were soaring. As the season came to a triumphant close it was clear that Buehrle would not be part of John Gibbons’ four-man rotation in the playoffs. In an effort to get him the two innings he needed to extend his streak of seasons with 200 innings pitched to 15 – a mark shared only by Cy Young, Warren Spahn, Gaylord Perry and Don Sutton – Gibbons started him on one day’s rest in the Blue Jays’ final game of the regular season.
It was a disaster: Buehrle gave up eight runs before getting yanked in the first inning.
Seeing that streak come to an end and then having to tell Buehrle that he wasn’t part of the Blue Jays’ post-season plans still weighs on his manager.
“He probably handled it better than I thought he would, given who he is and his stature and what he’s accomplished,” said Gibbons. “It was tough, you know? I got a soft spot for the guy, as most people do. But really what it came down to is we gave the edge to those four other guys and he understood that. He didn’t battle us on that.
“We thought about putting him in the ’pen but he hasn’t done that since his rookie year so I don’t think it would have been fair to him. At this stage of his career it takes him time to gear it up and prep coming out of the bullpen and that would have been tough.”
Gibbons still wishes the season had ended differently.
“He’s one of my all-time favourites I ever managed,” he says. “It really still haunts me to this moment him not getting his 200 innings this year and that will haunt me forever. It was an unbelievable run.
“And there were was a lot of things we did this season, we skip his starts but we pushed him back a couple of times and that affected that, otherwise he would have gotten it, so that hangs over me right now too, and then he’s not on the playoff roster, you wonder, is that fair to a guy of that stature?”
Gibbons needn’t worry. One of Buehrle’ most enduring traits is that he’s the same person after a complete game shutout as he is when he gets knocked around and pulled in the fourth. Always has been. Anyone wondering if he was in the midst of an existential crisis after being left off the Blue Jays’ post-season roster can relax.
“It’s hard, but when you look at yourself in the mirror and realize there are other guys throwing better than you right now, what can you do?” he said Monday while standing in the tunnel behind the Blue Jays dugout after coming in from shagging flies in batting practice, the only time he gets on the field these days. “If I was throwing good or throwing better than I was at the end and wasn’t someone that was struggling I’d be on the roster and I’d be able to go out there and throw.”
Still Buehrle has made his mark. Marcus Stroman has been the rock of the Blue Jays rotation and he can’t help but give credit to ‘Papa Buehrle’ as a calming influence as he navigated his rookie season a year ago and his first brush with post-season baseball now.
And he even managed to get thrown out of a game, one of the subplots of the Blue Jays’ epic win in Game 5 of the ALDS.
“I’m doing what I can to cheer the team on,” he joked. “If they get in a fight I’m charging the field trying to be a bodyguard or a bouncer to make sure other guys don’t get kicked out.
His transgression was leaving the dugout as a non-roster player. A rule he didn’t know because he’s never had cause.
“I didn’t say anything, I was laughing, having a good time, making sure no one else could get kicked out,” he said of his role in the Blue Jays’ seventh-inning skirmish with the Texas Rangers.
It’s not the contributions one of the best left-handed pitchers of his generation might otherwise have been counted on for, but Buehrle is here to help, even if he’s not pitching.
Always reliable, just in a different way.
“I do what I do,” he says. “I try to stay positive and have a good time. I feel like I’m helping out, but someone else might say ‘get this guy out of here, he’s doing nothing but taking up space.’”
No. No one is saying that. No one ever has.