Brothers and sisters, I want to talk this morning about a graveyard.

Not a metaphorical one. I have no use for a metaphorical graveyard. I mean a proper field of the slain, a place where the ground has been so thoroughly worked over by suffering that the farmers who till it centuries later still turn up buttons and teeth. That is what the National League East has become in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-six, and I intend to walk you through it, and I want you to mind your footing.

Consider the standings. Atlanta, seventy wins and forty-six losses, eight and a half games clear of the field. And now consider what that team looked like eleven months ago: seventy-six and eighty-six, no October, the manager who had presided over the golden age retiring into an advisory chair, the roster a hospital ward.

A year ago they were finished. Today they are the instrument.

And do you know what the rest of that division has done in the meantime? It has held auditions. Philadelphia dismissed its manager a month into the season and has been operating under an interim ever since. New York dismissed its manager at midseason and did the same. Every skipper in the division is essentially brand new. Five clubs, and the only one that walked into this year knowing precisely who it was and precisely what it intended is the one now standing on the pile —

— and I am reminded, brothers, of the field at Cannae.

Two hundred and sixteen years before Christ. Hannibal takes a smaller force and lets his center bend, lets it sag backward like a rotten fencepost, and the Romans pour into that sagging middle with all the joy of men who believe they are winning, and the wings close, and by evening there is no room to swing a sword because the dead are standing upright, held up by the press of the living. Livy tells us of men found in the morning with their heads buried in the earth — they had scraped holes in the dirt in the night and smothered themselves rather than —

I am getting ahead of myself.

Forgive me. Sit down, Linus. Sit down.

The Lord did not call me to this newspaper to dwell on the pit at Cannae, however instructive the pit at Cannae may be. He called me to baseball. Let us return to baseball. Let us breathe.

Here is the doctrine. A season is not lost in September. A season is lost in the quiet months, in the meetings nobody covers, in the decision to hire a man who knows what he is doing and then leave him be. Atlanta hired its new manager and let him work. He has them thirty-nine and twenty at home. Their great young star came off the injured list and walked back into right field as though he had merely stepped out for air. At the deadline they did not make fireworks; they made repairs — a starter here, an outfielder there, an arm for a bullpen that had been bleeding from a wound nobody wanted to look at.

That is not a miracle. Do not call it a miracle in my hearing. A miracle is unearned. This was maintenance, performed by serious men, in the dark, while the rest of the division was interviewing.

And their rivals? Philadelphia bought at the deadline — a batting champion, a good arm — and it may work, it very well may. But understand what they are attempting. They are eight games back and reaching for the collar of a team that has not slipped since May. They are attacking uphill, into prepared ground, in August.

And I do not say the word Fredericksburg lightly.

But I will say it. I will say it because it is true. Fourteen assaults. Fourteen. Wave after wave of good and living men crossing six hundred yards of open ground toward a stone wall on a sunken road, and behind that wall the rifles stacked four deep, and the muzzle flashes running left to right along the line like a struck match, and the ones who made it closest — the closest any man got — fell not thirty paces from —

Linus.

Brother Linus. Set it down.

...Set it down.

Forgive me, congregation. The flesh is weak and mine is weaker than most. I make no apology for the interest; I make apology only for the volume.

Let me close where a man ought to close, which is in the fear of the thing.

The Braves have not won anything. Understand me. It is the eighth of August. There is no trophy in the eighth of August, only the appearance of safety, which is the oldest ambush in the created world. Ask the Assyrians outside Jerusalem. Ask any army that has ever gone to sleep confident on ground it had not scouted. Every club in that division is presently held over a hot October by a slender thread, and the thread is not made of standings — it is made of elbows and hamstrings and one bad week in September, and it can part without a sound.

So no. Do not celebrate in Atlanta yet.

Look at your bullpen. Look at your calendar. Look at that stone wall.

And go quietly about your repairs.

Amen, and I'll see you Sunday.

The Rev. Dr. Linus Chutney covers baseball. He holds two doctorates, one of them relevant. He requests that readers stop mailing him battlefield photographs; his wife has asked, and he has agreed, and it is not going well.