Hours before Madison Bumgarner created controversy with his seven-inning, unofficial no-hitter, Diamondbacks right-hander Zac Gallen nearly did the same.

But after giving up one hit in his seven-inning complete game performance on Sunday afternoon, Gallen downplayed what a no-hitter would have meant to him.

“I turned to (catcher Stephen Vogt) after and he said, ‘Man, that would have been sick,’” Gallen said after the Diamondbacks’ 5-0 win in the first game of Sunday’s doubleheader.  “I said, ‘Nah, forget that. I want a legit one.’”

With more performances like Sunday, a no-hitter for Gallen seems inevitable.

He was dominant and efficient, shutting down the Braves lineup with what looked like relative ease. He allowed only a handful of hard-hit balls, perhaps only two that even opposing hitters would have argued ought to have gone for hits.

The one he did allow was not one of them, a one-out single in the sixth that Freddie Freeman dumped into short right-center field. For Gallen, there was an amusing anecdote to go along with that hit.

Gallen realized after the fourth he had not yet allowed a hit, a thought that stayed in his mind as he took the mound for the fifth. But by the time he went back out for the sixth, he said, he had forgotten about the no-hitter.

And so he was caught off guard to see Diamondbacks right fielder Kole Calhoun leave his feet in a fruitless attempt to catch Freeman’s ball, which fell several feet away from Calhoun’s outstretched glove.

“I was like, ‘Why is Kole diving?’” Gallen said. “He said, ‘I didn’t want to leave any doubt.’ I appreciate Kole playing as hard as he does every game.”

Five days earlier, Gallen appeared tentative at times against the Cincinnati Reds. He would get to two strikes but sometimes had trouble putting guys away, looking like a pitcher nibbling at the edges of the strike zone.

Gallen looked entirely different on Sunday, aggressively attacking the strike zone with all of his pitches. As a result, he got through his seven innings with what, for him, was maximum efficiency; he needed only 83 pitches.

The game counted as the first complete game and the first shutout of Gallen’s career — and it appeared as though he might have been able to finish it off had the game lasted a full nine innings.

“He had more in the tank,” Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said. “He probably would have gone eight or nine on a normal day. That’s how good he was.”

Gallen said his improved efficiency was less about mentality and more about pitch effectiveness. In Cincinnati, he did not feel like had good feel for either of his breaking balls. On Sunday, however, he felt he had good action and command for both his curveball and cutter.

The reemergence of his curveball could be an important development. Gallen suffered a hairline fracture in his right forearm during spring training, an injury he said he could feel only when throwing his curveball.

As he gave the injury time to heal, he continued to play catch but stopped throwing his curveball for a two-week span. He said he realized while playing catch between starts last week that he had inadvertently altered his pitch grip.

“I don’t know how I stumbled upon it,” Gallen said, “but I was realizing I wasn’t digging my fingernail into the seam like I usually do. The last couple of days I really tried to concentrate on that.

“I had two weeks off from throwing it, so of course I’m going to have a little bit of rust. I’m glad it didn’t take me too much longer to figure out what the fix was.”

Since the start of last year, doubleheaders have been played as a pair of seven-inning contests. Elias Sports Bureau, baseball’s official statistician, ruled that a no-hitter thrown under such conditions would not count because it was not at least nine innings.

Gallen said he was not aware of that interpretation until he was told about it after the game. He said he does not disagree with the thinking, noting that the final two innings of a no-hit bid are the most intense and require the most concentration for a pitcher.

He said he even admitted to Vogt that he might not have followed through on the usual batterymate gift following a no-hitter.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if could have did the Rolex,’” Gallen said. “‘It probably would have been an Omega one or a TAG.’”

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Reach Piecoro at (602) 444-8680 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @nickpiecoro.