Cade Cavalli Takes No-Hitter Into 7th, Extends MLB-Best Quality Start Streak to Seven in Nationals’ Blowout Win Over Cubs

Cade Cavalli is pitching like the ace Washington always believed he could become. The right-hander carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Chicago Cubs on Thursday, settling for a one-hitter over eight dominant innings in a 7-0 Nationals win. It was his seventh consecutive quality start, the longest active streak in Major League Baseball and the longest by a Nationals starter since Max Scherzer’s 14-start run in 2019.

The performance capped a stretch that has turned Cavalli into one of the most electric arms in the National League over the last month. A 2020 first-round pick out of Oklahoma who missed the entire 2023 and 2024 seasons recovering from Tommy John surgery, Cavalli didn’t return to a big league mound until August 2025. Less than a year later, he opened this season as the Nationals’ Opening Day starter and has since blossomed into a legitimate workhorse, sitting at 9-5 with a 3.57 ERA and 141 strikeouts across 128.2 innings entering Thursday’s outing.

A No-Hit Bid That Nearly Went the Distance

Cavalli needed just 54 pitches to get through five innings against the Cubs, retiring the first 15 batters he faced in order. Chicago didn’t reach base until the sixth, when Dansby Swanson drew a leadoff walk, and Cavalli responded by getting Michael Conforto to ground into a double play before striking out Miguel Amaya on a 98.9 mph fastball. The no-hit bid survived into the seventh, with Cavalli fanning Pete Crow-Armstrong for the second time that afternoon, before Michael Busch finally broke it up with a two-out bloop single to shallow left. Cavalli got a standing ovation from the Nationals Park crowd, retired Alex Bregman to escape the inning, then came back out for the eighth — a day before his 28th birthday — and struck out Conforto again on his 103rd and final pitch. He finished with one hit, two walks and 10 strikeouts allowed over eight innings, the first eight-plus-inning, one-hit-or-fewer, double-digit strikeout game against the Cubs since Cole Hamels’ no-hitter in 2015.

The Streak Nationals Fans Have Waited Years For

Thursday’s gem was the latest chapter in a run that started well before the Cubs series. Cavalli’s previous start, on Aug. 8, saw him beat the Cincinnati Reds 5-3 despite allowing three solo home runs — from Eugenio Suárez, Matt McLain and Elly De La Cruz — over six-plus innings, striking out eight while picking up his ninth win of the season. That outing pushed his quality-start streak to six at the time, part of a stretch in which he posted a 2.75 ERA, a 1.08 WHIP and a 36:8 strikeout-to-walk ratio across 36 innings. With bettors tracking Washington’s rotation closely for late-season value, Cavalli’s stretch has been one of the more reliable trends on the board, and those exploring newer betting formats have increasingly been checking how prediction markets work to price his outings against traditional pitcher props.

The turnaround has been years in the making. Cavalli’s 2023 season ended before it started when he blew out his elbow that March, and he spent all of 2024 on a slow rehab track before finally returning to the majors in August 2025, tossing 4.1 scoreless innings in his first outing back against the Athletics. He went 3-1 with a 4.25 ERA in 10 starts that season while the Nationals carefully managed his workload. This year, with no such restrictions, Cavalli has been unleashed — he’s made a career-high 25 starts, thrown a career-high 128.2 innings, and is doing it all wearing No. 24 for a Washington team looking for something to build around.

The Nationals’ offense did its part to back him up on Thursday, too. Abimelec Ortiz, who was recalled on Aug. 3 to help fill the void left by the trade of Luis García Jr. to the Yankees, launched a three-run homer during a five-run fifth inning that blew the game open, and he’s now up to four home runs and eight RBIs in just 10 games since returning to the roster. Daylen Lile and Dylan Crews also factored into the scoring, giving Cavalli more than enough cushion on a day when he barely needed it. Bettors monitoring the Nationals’ run of games this week can find matchup pricing and lines through resources like a DraftKings promo code for anyone looking to get in on the action around Washington’s current stretch.

What Comes Next

Cavalli’s next scheduled start lines up on the road, and after stringing together seven straight quality outings, the league will be paying close attention to whether he can extend the streak into a rare eighth. For a Nationals franchise still searching for its next homegrown star, Cavalli’s summer has been a much-needed jolt. He’s shown the strikeout stuff that made him a top prospect before the injury, a deep pitch mix that keeps hitters off balance, and now the innings totals that suggest the team no longer needs to handle him with kid gloves. For bettors, his starts have become must-watch events in their own right, and if Washington continues lining him up against contenders down the stretch, his next few turns through the rotation could carry real weight for anyone tracking pitcher props.