MLB Crowned Them Number One. Then Baseball Happened.

MLB.com published their Power Rankings on Saturday. The Braves were number one. First time in three-plus years. Best record in baseball. Best run differential. Best rotation ERA in the National League. A team that barely made any offseason acquisitions embarrassing every roster that did.

Two days later they lost 12-0 to the Miami Marlins.

A position player pitched the eighth inning. The bullpen walked five batters in a single frame. The best offense in baseball managed four hits. Four.

This is the greatest sport on earth.

I have been at 92 percent on the Braves being the best team in the NL since April 25. I said it when the Phillies were imploding. I said it when Sale was painting corners like a man trying to win his second Cy Young out of spite. I said it when they hit 30 wins before anyone else in baseball.

I am not moving.

Not one point. Not half a point. The 92 stays.

Because here is what baseball does that no other sport can do: it humiliates you on schedule. The NFL gives you one game a week and every loss feels existential. The NBA lets you coast through a Tuesday in November and nobody notices. Baseball gives you 162 games and says good luck pretending any of them define you.

The Braves are 32-16. They have won 13 of their first 15 series. They lead the NL East by eight games. Their pitching staff is first in ERA despite having half the injured list devoted to arms. They are the best team in baseball.

They are also the team that just got shut out by the 22-26 Marlins while a guy named Javier Sanoja hit his first career grand slam off a reliever who threw 42 pitches and only found the strike zone 16 times.

Both things are true. At the same time. On the same day they got crowned number one.

That is not a contradiction. That is the sport.

The Power Rankings piece nailed the thesis: 2.84 rotation ERA, a 37-year-old Chris Sale outpacing his own Cy Young season, a front office that built a juggernaut by standing still while everyone else overpaid. All of that is still true tonight. None of it mattered tonight.

Max Meyer threw six innings of three-hit ball. He did not care about the rankings. JR Ritchie got tagged for six runs in four innings. He did not benefit from the rankings. Aaron Bummer walked five batters in one inning — five — and the Power Rankings could not throw a strike for him.

The rankings measure what a team is. Monday night measured what a game is. Different things.

Ellis is going to write something measured and smart about Ritchie's walk rate and the bullpen depth. He is right. Those are real concerns buried inside a meaningless score.

But I am not here for the concerns. I am here for the comedy.

The best team in baseball. Number one in the country. Forty-eight games of dominance. And the Marlins — the Marlins — just hung a dozen on them while 8,672 people watched at loanDepot Park.

Someone at MLB.com pushed publish on that Power Rankings piece, leaned back, and thought the Braves section was settled for a week.

Baseball said hold on.

Bookmark this. Not because I will be wrong. Because this is exactly the kind of night you need to remember in October when the Braves are still the best team in the National League and somebody tries to tell you a 12-0 loss in May meant something.

It did not.

Tell me I am wrong.