Father and son would arrive at the Keller High School baseball field in the Dallas-Fort Worth area around 4:45 p.m., about 45 minutes after dad checked out of work for the day.

They’d fill a bucket full of baseballs and sit them down at an unusual distance -- nearly half of the 60 feet, 6 inches a pitcher’s mound is from home plate.

Lee, the dad, was in his mid-60s, so the shorter distance would ideally provide the best way to replicate the reaction time a batter would experience against a Major League pitcher.

They set up an L-screen, which was a lifesaver at times for Dad, considering the thunderous impact son would make on a baseball.

“There were a few times where I kind of got a little big-eyed,” Lee recalls.

Dad’s best playing days were well behind him -- he played at a community college in Cleveland and some men’s leagues later on. He went on to become a geologist working in the oil industry and gave up playing when his first-born, Derek, started playing the game. But on these warm Texas afternoons, he’d throw 200 pitches to his third-born son, Max. And fortunately for Max, dad’s fastball had some natural cutting action, upping the difficulty.

Max had just been cut by the Oakland Athletics at the end of March 2017, as Opening Day of the Major League regular season was days away. With teams cutting down and not adding, Max was unemployed. His spirits were down, but he was undeterred.

Keep working, he thought, and work would come.

Dad would work locations with his pitches. He’d call out situations so that each swing had a purpose.

“Short step. Quick hands,” Dad would say before delivering the baseball -- the same phrase he used when pitching to Max when he was a child.

Junior varsity players hit in the cage next to them and varsity players practiced on the baseball field as the former big leaguer hit, and hit and hit.

“Treating it like I was a kid again brought me back,” Max Muncy says.

Weeks later, Max signed a Minor League contract with the Dodgers.

A little over a year later, after spending the 2017 season in Triple-A Oklahoma City, Muncy was back in the Major Leagues. He hit 35 home runs for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2018. He participated in the All-Star Game Home Run Derby. He hit a walk-off home run in the 18th inning of Game 3 of the World Series. Three voters put his name down in the National League Most Valuable Player ballot -- one seventh- and two ninth-place votes.

From cast-off to walk-off, it was almost inconceivable how far Muncy had come. If someone would’ve told him at the beginning of 2018 he’d hit 35 home runs in one of the all-time great Dodger breakout seasons, even Muncy wouldn’t have believed it.

“I would have called you a liar,” Muncy says.

His father would have, too.

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” Lee says. “To get to the Majors and hit those kinds of home runs and have that kind of year, it’s kind of unbelievable.”

But now, Muncy is making believers out of everyone again.

Muncy is batting .268/.371/.546/.917 with 26 home runs and 68 RBI. His 4.1 WAR, according to Baseball Reference, is fourth in the National League among position players.

In game 81 of the Dodgers’ season, he reached base for a 34th consecutive game -- a season-best by a National Leaguer this season.

“The person for me that is kind of defining what we’re doing is Max Muncy, really,” says manager Dave Roberts. “His at-bat quality … the versatility, open-mindedness to play anywhere on the field, hit anywhere, running the bases and obviously the big hits and the homers.”

Muncy says he prefers to be under the radar. But sometimes there’s a fire that just comes out, like the one many saw publicly after letting Madison Bumgarner know he could get his home run out of the ocean. Or the one more privately in how motivated he was to have a follow-up season to his incredible 2018.

“There is definitely a little more satisfaction (with how I have performed thus far) because coming into this year, all I heard people talking about was, ‘Oh, teams are going to make the adjustment. You’re not going to be able to do what you did last year,’” Muncy says. “Why can’t it work on both sides? Why can’t hitters make the adjustment? It kind of aggravated me a little bit to hear all these people saying all these things. I wanted to go out and prove I can still be a very productive player that I was last year.”

Max Muncy is the youngest in a hard-working, intellectual family. His oldest brother, Derek, is an aerospace engineer. His other older brother, Mike, followed in Lee’s footsteps as a geologist. Midge, Muncy’s mother, also studied geology in college.

The three boys grew up playing baseball. Muncy developed exceptional hand-eye coordination and strike-zone recognition early on through a couple of tricks. Muncy recalls practicing hitting with a soft mini-globe that his father took home from an oil and gas convention. The continents on the globe were raised, causing the orb to maneuver when it caught the wind. Lee recalls playing Whiffle ball with the boys, and to make the ball wobble or dart, the geologist would squeeze a rock through one of the ball’s holes.

Muncy’s strike-zone discipline is considered one of his best qualities at the plate. Last year, he ranked 11th in the Majors (minimum 450 plate appearances) in lowest percentage of swings on balls outside of the zone at 21.5 percent, according to FanGraphs. He is at 24.9 percent this year -- 20th in the Majors and tops on the Dodgers.

Another one of those special qualities is his competitive nature.

Having two older brothers helped add another layer to his game -- a drive to be better than others. Derek is nine years older than him. That didn’t intimidate Muncy.

“You always want to beat your older brother, have that edge, let him know you’re better than him. So it was like you better get better, because at first he was always beating me,” Muncy says.

The intelligence, the work, the desire, the competitiveness -- they’re all reasons for Muncy’s eventual success story. And he’s enjoying all that has come.

Muncy says he plays the game with gratitude. Coming from where he was -- cast away by the Oakland A’s, fighting his way back into the game with the help of his father and going back to the Minor Leagues -- makes him appreciate the opportunities he has.

So there is exuberance.

The first home run he hit as a Dodger was in his first start and second game with the club -- an April 18, 2018, two-run homer off San Diego’s Luis Perdomo at Petco Park.

Two days after being called up from the Minors, five home runs in 96 previous Major League games with the A’s, and Muncy had the audacity to flip his bat.

 “I hit a home run, I’m not going to sit there and put my head down and run around the bases like it was nothing. It was awesome. It was a cool moment,” Muncy says. “Every time I hit a home run it makes me smile inside. It’s a cool moment. There’s not that many people that get to hit home runs in the big leagues.”

And he has continued to express himself similarly, most notably when he ambushed a Madison Bumgarner pitch in the first inning on June 9 and sent it into McCovey Cove beyond the wall in right field at Oracle Park in San Francisco. Muncy flipped his bat and jogged. Both actions drew the ire of the veteran left-hander, who barked at him to run the bases. Muncy barked back.

 “The whole point of it is, I’m not going to back down,” Muncy says. “That was the whole point of that situation. I’m not going to sit there and let somebody yell at me. I don’t care who you are. If you want to come yell at me, you better come prove to be the guy you claim to be. That was the whole thing to me. I’m not going to back down. If you want to bully me, you’re going to get something back.”

When the Dodgers arrived back at Dodger Stadium after their road trip on June 13, a box of shirts with his comment “Go get it out of the ocean” emblazoned on the front, were waiting on his chair in front of his locker.

 “It’s a very comfortable T-shirt,” Muncy deadpanned. “I don’t know what they made it out of. It’s light. It’s comfy.”

This joy and this confidence, Roberts reasons, is not only healthy for Muncy, but helps him elevate his game.

 “He is blue-collar, to the homer off Bumgarner and to the responding back. Yeah, there’s a confidence, there’s a swagger. But there’s a good balance of it, which I love,” Roberts says.

The balance includes a mindset that still keeps Muncy grounded. He went into Spring Training this season having moved on from his 2018 season with the thought that he had to earn his way onto the 2019 roster. In Spring Training, Muncy didn’t hit a home run. But he says there was no panic, and he wouldn’t press. His thoughts were that if he continued to take thoughtful approaches at the plate and his mechanics were right, results would follow.

On Opening Day, he homered. There were some challenging times in April -- including a run of 19 plate appearances without a hit. But from May 4-June 30 -- a span of 50 games for Muncy -- he OPSed 1.001 with 15 home runs. Since July 13, he is batting .333/.459/.767/1.226 with four home runs.

The season’s first-half was validation for Muncy -- that there was more than just the great story of 2018.

 “I’m extremely proud of him,” Lee says. “I love watching him play.”