For those who followed Sunday’s exciting Dodgers / Giants game on the MLB At-Bat app or on Twitter, there is an exceptionally good chance that they came away believing that the final game in the three-game series between these two longtime arch rivals was all about the verbal confrontation between hot-headed Giants right-hander Madison Bumgarner and Dodgers first baseman Max Muncy.

And while this is absolutely true when you consider that is was Muncy’s first-inning / 426-foot “splash-hit” solo home run into McCovey Cove off of MadBum that accounted for the only scoring in the two hour and 31 minute / 1-0 contest in front of 34,098 at Oracle Park in San Francisco (many of whom were Dodger fans), there was another guy who had a tremendous amount to do with that zero in that 1-0 final score; 24-year-old Dodgers right-hander Walker Buehler, who was nothing short of brilliant in his 7.0 innings of work on Sunday afternoon.

All the young Lexington, Kentucky native and Dodgers first-round draft pick in 2015 out of Vanderbilt University did was allow no runs and only five hits, while walking one and striking out nine Giants batters, doing so on only 91 pitches of which 69 were strikes.

“It was kind of an old-school baseball game, with two number ones going head-to-head,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters after his team’s 45th win of the season that their fifth consecutive series win. “With our ballclub, we have a lot of aces. For Walker to understand we had a chance to win a series, to face a number one on the other side and to come with that intent today, it was really fun to see.”

That it was; especially this part of it:

But here again, despite Muncy’s splash smash and Bumgarner’s childish antics, it was Buehler’s seven innings of shutout ball; followed by a 1-2-3 eighth-inning by Dodgers right-hander Pedro Baez; followed by a 1-2-3 ninth inning by Dodgers All-Star right-handed closer Kenley Jansen (with two strikeouts), that Dodger fans – and the media – should be talking about.

“When you’re on line and on time, you can do a lot more things with the ball,” said Buehler after the game. “Earlier in the year my misses were all in the same place and my good throws were all in the same place. When you can command the four quadrants, and watching our guys do that, you learn from that.”

As for Muncy, he etched his name into Dodgers / Giants lore and became an immediate Dodgers legend when he was asked about Bumgarner’s verbal rant when MadBum thought Muncy was taking too long with his home run trot around the bases.

“I hit the ball and then he yelled at me,” Muncy told SportsNet LA’s Alanna Rizzo during an on-field interview immediately after the game. “He said ‘Don’t watch the ball, you run,’ and I just responded back ‘If you don’t want me to watch the ball, you can go get it out of the ocean.’“

You can expect to hear those now-immortal words uttered for years and perhaps even decades to come … not to mention soon seeing them printed on T-shirts wherever Dodger fans can be found.

Play Ball!

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