In need of offensive assistance, the Indians acquired Cubs outfielder Kosuke Fukudome on Thursday in a trade for minor league outfielder Abner Abreu and pitcher Carlton Smith.

Fukdome, who is batting .273 with three home runs and 13 RBIs in 87 games for Chicago, is expected to fill in for an injured Shin-Soo Choo in right field.

Cleveland, which has lost six of its last seven games and trails the first-place Tigers by two games in the Central Division, has struggled offensively for much of the year and mightily as of late. The Indians, who were no-hit by the Angels Ervin Santana on Wednesday, have scored seven runs over the past seven games.

To clear room for Fukodome on the big league and 40-man roster, the Indians designated outfielder Travis Buck for assignment.

CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Indians have acquired outfielder Kosuke Fukudome from the Chicago Cubs to help their sagging offense.

The Indians dealt Triple-A right-hander Carlton Smith and Class-A outfielder Abner Abreu for Fukudome on Thursday, a day after being no-hit by the Angels Ervin Santana.

The Indians also received cash in the deal. The 34-year-old Fukudome is being paid $13.5 million in 2011.

Fukudome is batting .279 with three homers and 13 RBIs in 87 games this season. In 513 games overall since the Cubs signed him to a four-year, $48 million deal as a much-sought free agent from Japan in 2008, he has hit .262 with 37 homers and 169 RBIs.

Outfielder Travis Buck was designated for assignment to clear roster room in Cleveland.

CLEVELAND — After seven seasons of struggling against the Cleveland Indians, Ervin Santana’s first win at Progressive Field was one for the record books.

Angels starting pitcher Ervin Santana (54) celebrates with his teammates after pitching a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians Wednesday in Cleveland. (AP photo.)

Santana threw the ninth no-hitter in Los Angeles Angels history Wednesday, striking out 10 in a 3-1 win over the Indians.

“I was able to throw everything today,” Santana said. “My fastball, my curve, even my change-up. I was able to locate all of my pitches.”

The 28-year-old right-hander retired 22 hitters in a row after Ezequiel Carrera led off the game by reaching base on an error by Los Angeles shortstop Erick Aybar.

“What Ervin did today was special,” said Angels manager Mike Scioscia, a former big league catcher who caught no-hitters by Fernando Valenzuela and Kevin Gross as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1980s. “You have to appreciate it even more because he was pitching under pressure in a tight ball game. He had command of his fastball and his breaking ball got sharper as the game went on.

“Every no-hitter is different, but the feeling is the same. There is that special excitement.”

Santana, who is now 6-8 in 2011 and has a career record of 82-64, said he didn’t really start thinking about a no-hitter until the seventh or eighth inning. But he won’t soon forget the feeling when he saw Los Angeles centerfielder Peter Bourjos snag the final out, a fly ball off the bat of Michael Brantley.

“Excitement,” Santana said. “I was proud of our performance today.”

It was the first no-hitter by an Angels pitcher since Mark Langston and Mike Witt combined to no-hit Seattle on April 11, 1990. The last individual no-hitter tossed by an Angels pitcher occurred on the final day of the 1984 season when Mike Witt pitched the only perfect game in franchise history, defeating Texas 1-0.

Wednesday also marked the first time a no-hitter was thrown at Progressive Field since its opening in 1994. The last time Cleveland was no-hit was Sept. 4, 1993, when the New York Yankees’ Jim Abbott held the Tribe hitless at Yankee Stadium.

As special as the day was for Santana, his catcher Bobby Wilson was just as excited about being part of history.

“This is what we all (as catchers) work for every day of our careers to be part of this,” said Wilson, who also caught a no-hitter in Triple-A with the Sacramento River Cats. “All of the time we spend in spring training getting to know the pitchers, this is what it’s all about.”

Santana is 3-0 in the month of July after going 0-4 in June, but Scioscia said Santana has pitched better then his record would indicate.

However, Santana had never previously had success against the Tribe, coming into the game with a career mark of 0-6 with a 4.98 ERA. He made his major league debut at Progressive Field on May 17, 2005, allowing six runs in four innings.

“Ervin has matured as a pitcher since that first start,” Scioscia said. “The biggest difference is his command. Back then he was throwing the ball over the heart of the plate, now he has command of the plate.”

That command was evident Wednesday as Santana threw 76 of his 105 pitches for strikes. He only allowed one walk, to Indians third baseman Lonnie Chisenhall in the eighth inning.

Angels right fielder Torii Hunter said he saw something special Wednesday as he watched Santana work.

“I’ve seen him pitch a lot, he has thrown a lot of good games,” Hunter said. “But this was the best stuff he’s ever had.”

Santana has the distinction of being the first pitcher to toss a non-shutout no-hitter since Houston’s Darryl Kyle in 1993 against the New York Mets. The Indians scored their run in the first inning when Carrera scored on a wild pitch.

Cleveland only hit four balls out of the infield against Santana.

The closest the Indians got to a base hit was in the sixth inning when Jason Kipnis led off the inning with a hard grounder that Los Angeles second baseman Howie Kendrick dove to stop. Kendrick’s throw to Mark Trumbo at first just beat Kipnis.

Santana gave much of the credit for the no-hitter to Wilson.

“Me and Bobby were on the same page,” Santana said. “I just kept my mind on Bobby’s glove and focused in.”

It was the third no-hitter in the American League this season. Minnesota’s Francisco Liriano and Detroit’s Justin Verlander each threw no-hitters in a five-day span in early May.

Santana has the chance to join a more elite group in his next start. In 1938, Johnny Vander Meer became the only pitcher in MLB history to throw back-to-back no-hitters, when, as a member of the Cincinnati Reds, he no-hit the Boston Bees and the Brooklyn Dodgers in consecutive starts.

Contact Todd Shapiro at 329-7135 or ctsports@chroniclet.com.

ELYRIA — Built in 1894, the Washington Building of Elyria High School is a three-story Romanesque architecture-inspired classic that fell into disrepair over the years and needed more than just a touch up to bring it back to glory.

A construction worker puts up walls on an arch that is being made with some of the pieces from an old Elyria High building. (CT photo by Bruce Bishop.)

But that rejuvenation is well under way, and district officials hope it will become the crown jewel of the district’s $70 million construction project of a new Elyria High School.

Click here to view more photos.

It was not easy to design and build a new school around a 117-year-old building that residents fought to have listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, but it was important, said Elyria Superintendent Paul Rigda.

“Very early on in the project, before any of this was ever done, we had an idea that included tearing down all of the old buildings and building new,” Rigda said while standing in the school’s under-construction cafeteria. “But as soon as we presented it to the community, the response was overwhelming. There were a lot of people who said, ‘Not this building. It has too much history.’ ”

So Rigda gave the architect team an edict: Make the Washington Building both stand out and blend in.

Residents can check out the exterior details of the newly built portions of the school to see whether the concept worked.

The three tall, staggered windows in the peaks of the dormers pay homage to the three sets of three windows, one at the top of the Washington Building tower, and two at the top of the facade next to the tower.

The window arches in the new building’s dormers echo the arch at the entranceway to the Washington Building. And the rough-hewn limestone nearly matches the sandstone in the Washington Building.

“This is a special place,” said Zora Kovanovic of the Architectural Vision Group of Westlake, which specializes in designing school buildings and designed the new Elyria High. “That is why we wanted to keep a symbol of it around the entire campus. It shows in the colors, textures and finishes.”

Richard Nielson, the district’s business services director, jumped into the conversation and pointed out a block on the exterior of the gymnasium wall that is larger than the other bricks.
“Normally you don’t have cornerstones in new buildings, but we had one in the Washington Building so we have one here,” he said.

On the inside

An interior tour of the building will have to wait.

Earlier this month, school officials announced that the building’s construction timetable was behind schedule and portions of the building would not be ready for the Sept. 6 start of school.

The gym isn’t done. When school resumes, the cafeteria will be a dining-only facility because the kitchen isn’t completed. Gym classes will be postponed until at least the second quarter. And volleyball games once again will be played at the Administration Building on Griswold Road.

But a peek inside shows the second and third floors of the renovated Washington Building are nearly complete and set to open on time. The space will add 17 classrooms to the building. In addition, the first-floor rathskellar — a sort of student union for seniors that will be more of a meeting place than cafeteria — is set to open when classes resume. Located in the Washington Building, the space transforms what used to be useless catacombs into a college-like lounge for older students.

The dining hall is another example of the influence of the century-old building and the work that went into preserving it. The grand room, which will have a color scheme to match school colors, faces the exposed west wall of the Washington Building and the sandstone wall was built with hand-chiseled blocks to match the sandstone on the old building.

The masons who did that work also dismantled the archway of the old technical building piece-by-piece and reassembled it like a giant jigsaw puzzle to form one of the new main entrances, said Terry Tesmer, vice president of Regency Construction, the managing contracting company on the project.

The unified look is certainly not what former students saw with the old high school, whose hodgepodge of buildings was a sort of retrospective on the history of school architecture from 1894, when the Washington Building was finished, to 1955, when the auditorium and gymnasium were finished. All but the Washington Building have been demolished.

“It has been great working on this project,” Kovanovic said. “Where we had to put in new terrazzo flooring, we matched it to the existing terrazzo with the same colors and chips. We did about eight difference mixtures until we got the right recipe.”

Even the furniture that will grace the Washington Building is old meets new.

Students will not have slate tablets and inkwells reminiscent of 1894, said Rigda, but they will learn among some funky wood and metal retro pieces with a contemporary feel.

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com.