Jake Arrieta's no-hitter continues his transformation into one of baseball's best pitchers

Just Friday afternoon, two days before he'd make his 27th start of the season, Jake Arrieta had mused about the number of no-hitters he'd taken into the late innings the past couple years, none of which had ended in a no-hitter.

"Yeah," he said with a grin, "I'll keep trying for one of those."

On Sunday night, Arrieta no-hit the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium.

While this might fold into other stories – the no-hitter was the sixth in the big leagues since June 9, the second against the $300 million Dodgers in nine days, the first for a snake-bitten Chicago Cubs in seven years – there is first Arrieta, the 29-year-old right-hander kicked into a trade two years ago who became an ace.

He won his 17th game Sunday night, by a score of 2-0. He won it the way he wins anymore, with hard, precise fastballs, and with what some consider the best slider in the game, a darting curveball and with a sinker that runs low and hard and in the opposite direction of the slider. He'd taken four no-hitters into the seventh inning or later in the past two years, and lost the no-hitter in each. He won this one, finally, with a slider against Chase Utley, that Utley swung over, his 116th pitch for his 12th strikeout, and a fist pump, no hits allowed.

"It's a good feeling," Arrieta said. "I've come a long way."

He was for some time the pitcher with the elite stuff who missed by just enough, who hit a few too many bats, whose end result did not always match the talent and authority in his right arm. It is, perhaps, why the Baltimore Orioles traded him to the Cubs two years ago. Perhaps it is also why it was not a surprise to see Arrieta strike out Justin Turner, Jimmy Rollins and Utley in the ninth, sealing his first no-hitter, continuing what is by far the best season of his career.

He walked one batter, Rollins in the sixth inning. Another, Kike Hernandez, reached on a Starlin Castro error – "I thought it was a hit," Arrieta said. "I really did." – in the third inning. There were balls hit hard, and caught. Mostly, however, there was Arrieta bulling his way past the Dodgers, relentless on the corners with power pitches, dabbing at the zone with curveballs.

"My stuff was pretty crisp from the get-go," he said.

Previously, Arrieta had been two outs into the eighth inning with a no-hitter. He'd thrown 110 pitches or more in six starts this season. So, little of this – a stadium on its feet, three and four times through a lineup, each pitch heavy in his hand – was not entirely new. When he'd been traded to the Cubs, he'd decided his career would rest on his choices and his work, not on the urgings of others. He was 27 then, late to find oneself in baseball. But not too late, clearly.

His record over two years with the Cubs is 31-13, all of it after a conversation with Cubs pitching coach Chris Bosio. They'd spoken by telephone shortly after the trade.

"My only concern is coming to this organization, being myself and expressing my true abilities," Arrieta told Bosio.

He was tired of being tentative with mechanics foreign to him. He was frustrated by the apprehension he felt before throwing a pitch. He was too big, too strong, too smart for that, to fail.

"It was knowing," he said, "I'm capable of really good things."

After hugging teammates, being peppered with playful jabs by first baseman Anthony Rizzo, and searching for his wife and two children in the stands, Arrieta shared a long embrace with Bosio. He'd been close to being a good pitcher before, and become, for the moment, great. He'd been close to no-hitters before, and on Sunday night did that, too.

"You think about that all the time as a kid," he said. "And you see other guys around the league do it. And you want to be part of something like that.

"It's special. Very special."

More, he was in the final hours of August in the season he'd always believed in. He's a hard, intense guy with hard, intense eyes. Better, professionally speaking, he carries a handful of hard, intense pitches. And so there was no reason this couldn't be him.

"He's a different kind of animal," his manager, Joe Maddon, said. "He is."