By all rights the Seattle Mariners should have traded starting pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma at the MLB non-waiver trade deadline on July 31. A reasonable prospect-laden offer was reportedly lined up, and only the team’s Japanese ownership put the kibosh on a deal that would have netted the Mariners some potential quality future players in an otherwise lost season. Iwakuma is a free agent this off-season, and though the team will attempt to re-sign him, his age and injury history make his continued employment by a middling Seattle Mariners franchise an iffy bet at best.

Also, thank fucking god they didn’t trade him.

Because instead of a slightly more promising yet still deeply uncertain future, the Mariners got an afternoon of magic on Wednesday, with Iwakuma throwing a no-hitter against the Baltimore Orioles. He’s the franchise’s fourth pitcher to throw a complete game no-no (he joins Randy Johnson, Chris Bosio, and Felix Hernandez in the Mariners no-hit club). Good pitching on a summer afternoon is the coolest, so let’s run down all the facts on Iwakuma’s feat:

Iwakuma’s no-hitter is the first American League no-hitter since Hernandez’s perfect game. Before that was a combined no-hitter thrown by a cadre of Mariners pitchers consisting of Kevin Millwood, Charlie Furbush, Stephen Pryor, Lucas Luetge, Brandon League, and Tom Wilhelmsen. So, somehow, the Mariners have the last three American League no-hitters, and one of those was started by the desiccated husk of Kevin Millwood. Baseball is so weird.

The oft-maligned Jesus Sucre was Iwakuma’s catcher on Wednesday, and actually got an extra-base hit. Sucre out-hit an entire baseball team while providing a platform for a no-hitter. Sucre’s batting average is now squarely in the triple-digits. Baseball is seriously so weird.

And that weirdness can be glorious. I can’t imagine I’ll be writing about the Mariners much more this year in these parts. There’s the Seahawks' upcoming Quasi-Sufferable Road to Revengening and Reclamining the Super Bowl. There’s the roller coaster ride that is the Sounders' crash-landing into the playoffs. There’s the moral catastrophe that is college football. And this Mariners season has itself been catastrophic for being boring when all expectations were that it would be not boring. The team had appeared in the preseason to have done everything right, and yet here they are, still the fucking Mariners.

But, that said, they did make a shortsighted move this July that paid off in spades on an otherwise dreary Wednesday afternoon. And that’s pretty great.