From no-no to no stopping ’em
Sean Manaea walked to the mound in the sixth inning in pursuit of a no-hitter and suddenly lost control of his pitches.
Then the A’s lost control of the game.
On a bizarre Saturday afternoon at the Coliseum, in a game witnessed by 20,140, the theme went from “Astros can’t get a hit” to “A’s can’t get an out.”
The A’s fell 10-6 because neither Manaea nor the bullpen could finish the deal.
“It’s tough to be positive about a game like that,” manager Bob Melvin said. “We played so well and did everything right for five innings and (then) couldn’t play any worse and did everything wrong.”
Manaea threw five hitless innings but walked the first three batters in the sixth on 15 pitches, the final eight of which were balls.
Melvin gave Manaea one more batter, and Carlos Correa hit a sizzling liner to shortstop Adam Rosales, who was playing for injured Marcus Semien, shelved with a wrist injury.
The ball ricocheted off Rosales’ glove for an error, and center fielder Jaff Decker also made an error on the play. Two runners scored, and Manaea was pulled after 98 pitches.
“It had a little knuckle on it, but with the bases loaded, I’ve got to knock it down,” Rosales said. “It’s a tough one to swallow. Manaea was pitching so well, and we were producing runs. We had momentum. That plays needs to be made.”
Reliever Ryan Dull struck out Carlos Beltran, issued a walk to reload the bases and got Marwin Gonzalez to bounce into an inning-double play.
No-hit bid still intact.
From there, however, four A’s relievers surrendered two runs apiece. Nori Aoki got Houston’s first hit, a clean single off Liam Hendriks to begin the seventh. Hendriks, Santiago Casilla, Sean Doolittle and Frankie Montas took turns faltering.
“It snowballed on us,” Doolittle said. “I guess the silver lining here is we all kind of had a bad day at once. Hopefully we got it out of our system. We’ve got to be better coming into games in those situations and picking each other up.”
Manaea’s hitless outing became a footnote. As did one of the most unusual pitching lines in baseball history:
Five-plus innings, no hits, two runs, one earned run, five walks, six strikeouts.
No previous pitcher in recorded history — complete records date to 1913 — had such a line. Manaea became the first A’s starter since Chris Codiroli in 1986 to throw no-hit ball without completing the game.
With three innings remaining, the A’s had a crack at their first combined no-hitter since the final day of the 1975 regular season when Vida Blue, Glenn Abbott, Paul Lindblad and Rollie Fingers held the Angels hitless.
The last A’s no-no was the Mother’s Day perfect game by Dallas Braden in 2010.
Khris Davis collected three hits, including his sixth home run, and singled in the second inning to open a three-run rally that was capped by Rosales’ safety-squeeze bunt.
Trevor Plouffe also homered, and Decker, who was promoted from Triple-A Nashville to replace Mark Canha, had three hits, including an eighth-inning triple. He scored on Matt Joyce’s sacrifice fly.
John Shea is The San Francisco Chronicle’s national baseball writer. Email: jshea@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnSheaHey