If it seems like every other day someone is flirting with a no-hitter, and every other week someone is completing one, it isn't simply your imagination. Some six weeks into the 2018 season, Major League Baseball has already witnessed three no-hitters — one each in the United States, Mexico and Canada — and a nearly unprecedented rate of late-inning bids.
It is perhaps a silver lining of sorts — a more-than-occasional jolt of excitement, announced in push-notifications on smartphones and scrolls across the bottom of televisions (“No-hitter alert!”) — to an otherwise bleak and alarming trend taking over the game: the rise of strikeouts, the decline of hits and the sheer dearth of balls in play.