Baseball comes down to rituals, too many to count, too wonderful to bother. Some recur in some form annually. Others 162 times a year and then some. Once in a while they collide.

Saturday night, one of my favorite rituals of baseball, one of the bonus tracks on every season's DVD, popped up on the menu. [...]

If you went to bed at 10 and looked at the box score in the morning, maybe you thought, “Eh, ho-hum loss. Mets didn't convert hits, Padres got to Sosa early, Heilman stank.”

But it's not so. Or, rather, it's not the whole story.

Sosa was fine and the Mets fell apart late, but you could see [...]