LA’s Buehler silences Arizona bats in opener

The Dodgers pitched, slugged and won a game, delighting their sizeable fan base. That it came against the Diamondbacks — and on the road at Chase Field — made it an almost unnoteworthy sort of outcome.

That is, what happened on Monday night — the Dodgers won, 4-0, behind Walker Buehler’s three-hitter, his first career shutout — is what happens when these two teams meet. Or at least that is what has happened for going on three seasons.

Since the start of 2020, the Dodgers have played 30 games against the Diamondbacks. They have won 25 of them. In many of those, the games themselves were about as uncompetitive as that record would suggest.

In a sense, that was the case on Monday night. The Dodgers and Buehler were in control from the beginning. They had two runs after nine pitches from Diamondbacks right-hander Merrill Kelly. Buehler was in cruise control for the most of the evening.

But it was also the kind of game a team can often chalk up and move on. For a change, the Diamondbacks did not play sloppily. Kelly was solid, particularly when considering the depth of the opposing lineup.

And Buehler universally is regarded as one of the better pitchers in baseball. Nights like this against a pitcher like that? Those things happen.

“He was on today,” Diamondbacks left fielder David Peralta said. “We’ve faced him plenty of times and he’s an aggressive pitcher. He’ll attack you. He’s not going to mess around with you. I think we had a plan but it didn’t work the way we wanted. Sometimes you’ve got to tip your hat.”

Buehler allowed just three singles and hit a batter. The Diamondbacks had only three at-bats with a runner in scoring position. “He was landing a lot of breaking balls, keeping you honest so you couldn’t just sit on that fastball,” slugger Seth Beer said. You’ve just got to tip your hat to a guy like that. He pitched a heck of a game. It’s one of those things where you’ve got to look on to tomorrow.”

Manager Torey Lovullo, however, was not as willing to take his offense off the hook. He went only so far in crediting Buehler, saying his hitters went out of the zone more than he would have liked.

“Sometimes I think you’ve got to (credit the opposing pitcher),” Lovullo said. “I felt like we could have made it a little bit more of a bumpy road for him.”

Kelly issued a six-pitch walk to Mookie Betts to start the game, missing wide on a full-count fastball. Freddie Freeman (double to right) and Trea Turner (double inside third) followed with back-to-back run-scoring hits to put the Dodgers in front, 2-0.