Although we will never know exactly how many of the 29,904 in attendance at Chase Field for Saturday night’s game between the Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks were actual Dodger fans, it would be fair to say that the majority of them were.

…the vast majority of them.

What we do know is that 1,400 of them were there with the extremely popular Pantone 294 Dodgers-based fan group.

“There’s a lot of pride in our fan base and how they support us and follow us, and travel,” Dodgers starting pitcher Walker Buehler said when asked what it was like to walk off the field at an opposing stadium to a standing ovation. “It feels a lot like a home game here a lot of times, and they’re loud. It was a cool moment for me.”

“It was awesome. It felt like a home game today with all our fans here,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “And then when Walker got taken out of the game, it got loud. It was definitely for him and for the Dodgers.”

That standing ovation and ‘cool moment’ were, of course, the result of the 26-year-old Lexington, KY native and Dodgers first-round draft pick in 2015 out of Vanderbilt University coming within six outs of tossing the first individual Dodgers no-hitter since future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw did so on June 18, 2014, at Dodger Stadium.

“Man, I wanted that no-hitter … everyone wanted it,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said after his team’s 9-3 pounding of the NL West last-place Diamondbacks.

…everyone including those 1,400 Pantones 294 members and the rest of the ‘home game’ crowd.

As for Buehler, he exited the game with one out in the bottom of the eighth inning, having allowed two runs on two hits with two walks and 11 strikeouts, doing so on 108 pitches, of which 72 were strikes.

“Obviously I didn’t want to give up two hits,” Buehler told reporters after what was clearly the best outing of his five-year MLB career, to improve his 2021 record to an MLB-best 8-0 and lower his ERA to a team-best 2.38. “I felt pretty good with what I was doing and commanded the curveball pretty well. It was a good one.”

A good one indeed.

Play Ball!

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