The A’s’ Sean Manaea threw MLB’s first no-hitter of the 2018 season

Oakland pitcher Sean Manaea threw the first no-hitter of the 2018 major league season on Saturday. He led the A’s to a 3-0 win against the Red Sox in Northern California.

Manaea, 26, is in his third big-league season. He’s been a pretty solid pitcher for Oakland since debuting in 2016. He entered Saturday with a career 3.92 ERA. He’d pitched more than 300 innings over the previous two seasons and was tied for the team lead in wins above replacement by a pitcher last year (2.3, even with Sonny Gray, who’s now gone).

This was a dominant outing. Manaea walked two hitters and struck out 10. (One of Manaea’s walks was to the first batter of the game, Mookie Betts.) He threw 108 pitches, 75 of them strikes, in the course of facing 30 hitters in his nine innings. He induced nine groundouts and two flyouts. As non-perfect game no-hitters go, this is a really good one,

Congrats to Manaea and his teammates. Even with his 10 strikeouts, Oakland fielders had to turn 17 batted balls into outs to make his no-hitter stand up. That’s a team thing.