CHICAGO, June 14 -- The ball that ended Yoshinobu Yamamoto's perfect game never left the infield. It rolled slow and ordinary toward the one Los Angeles Dodger nobody at Rate Field had reason to fear, and Mookie Betts could not field it clean.

Two outs, eighth inning, Yamamoto twenty-two batters into a flawless evening. Chase Meidroth chopped a routine grounder to shortstop, the kind Betts has handled ten thousand times, and it caught the heel of his glove. The scorer ruled it an error. The perfect game was gone on a play Betts will replay for a while, and he stood in the dugout afterward looking like a man who had broken something that belonged to a friend. Yamamoto walked past and gave him a pat, as if to say it was fine.

It was not e...