PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Diamondbacks have had their share of strife over the past 10 days, dealing with another pitching injury and the fallout of having one of their best players ghost the team during a playoff race.
Rookie Ryan Waldschmidt changed the mood in a hurry on Tuesday night.
The 23-year-old entered the game as a pinch hitter with two outs in the ninth and smashed a two-run, game-winning homer to stun the Chicago Cubs 5-4. It was the team's 40th comeback win of the season, which leads the big leagues.
The D-backs trailed 4-0 after seven innings on Tuesday before scoring three runs in the eighth and two more in the ninth.
“I think they have the mentality that they're just a bunch of dogs and they're not going to stop,” manager Torey Lovullo said. "They're going to keep getting after it every single day and that's just ingrained in them. They have a great makeup.
“This group is pretty darn special. I legitimately think this group loves each other.”
The D-backs (70-63) moved one game behind the San Diego Padres for the final National League wild-card spot with the win. The Padres fell to the Pittsburgh Pirates 1-0 earlier Tuesday.
It was Waldschmidt's second walk-off homer of the season. His first came less than three weeks ago against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“It's pretty cool, but it says a lot about the team, not just me,” Waldschmidt said. “I just am the one who has gotten the opportunity to do it in these moments. I just think it says a lot about all of us. We're pretty resilient, we're never out of game.”
It was a galvanizing moment for a franchise that's had some rough moments over the past few weeks. Three-time All-Star Ketel Marte left the team in a lurch last week because of his mysterious absence before a game in Boston that provided days of headlines.
The team put Marte on the restricted list, eventually transferred the second baseman to the injured list, and hope he'll return for the team's series against the Philadelphia Phillies that starts Aug. 31.
Also, one of the team's best pitchers, right-hander Michael Soroka, went back on the injured list with a sore arm.
But the D-backs keep hanging around the wild-card race, and the team's grit is giving vibes of 2023, when the team barely qualified for the playoffs with a 84-78 record before making a run all the way to the World Series.
“We're going to go out there and fight,” Lovullo said.
See AP’s full MLB coverage here
Arizona Diamondbacks' Ryan Waldschmidt connects for a pinch hit, walk-off, two-run home run against the Chicago Cubs during the ninth inning of a baseball game, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Arizona Diamondbacks' Ryan Waldschmidt, center, celebrates his walk-off, two-run home run against the Chicago Cubs with Diamondbacks' Lars Nootbaar (21), Merrill Kelly and Tim Tawa, right, after a baseball game, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
JERUSALEM (AP) — The enormous doors were pushed shut, the clanking bolts secured from the outside and several clergy, pilgrims and one journalist — me — were locked for the night inside one of Christianity's holiest sites in Jerusalem.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built over the spots where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead.
Through many centuries, as Muslim rulers governed this region and changing politics affected the influence of religious powers, an arrangement evolved as unique as the church's jumbled architecture. Today, the Armenian Apostolic, Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches share the ownership of the worship space.
I watched through a tiny door slot as a representative from a Muslim family — they’ve been entrusted with the basilica’s keys since the 13th century — climbed a small wooden ladder to reach the upper bolt. Then he passed the ladder back through that same opening, which a Greek Orthodox priest locked shut too. Another wished us “Good night!” in English before hurrying away.
Most nights, from 9 p.m. to dawn, when the doors are reopened with the same ceremony, about a dozen priests, a smattering of registered pilgrims and a few cats have the sprawling, dark basilica to themselves.
While the priests and a few nuns quickly went about their rest or chores, it took us visitors a few quiet, contemplative moments to even decide where to start wandering in the venerated, labyrinthine space.
Peter Stängle, a pilgrim from Brazil, repeatedly prayed on his knees. His tattooed forearms and his forehead rested on the stone of the unction, where Jesus’s body is believed to have been prepared for burial.
“A lot is going through my mind — what I did wrong in my life, is there salvation for everybody, maybe even for me?” he said.
He'd been so distracted by the stream of visitors during the day — even though it's a far tinier number than before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Israel-Hamas war and the Iran war decimated tourism — that he considered hiding at closing time in one of the many side chapels. Then he discovered he could simply sign up to spend the night in prayer in the church.
The complex was mostly built in the Middle Ages on sites venerated since the 4th century. With renovations and additions still ongoing, our steps echoed on millennia-old stones while 20th-century wall mosaics glittered.
It's a multistory, meandering construction decorated in the different styles of the denominations that use it. In addition to their dedicated altars, all pilgrims tend to venerate three spots — the unction stone, the shrine built over Jesus' tomb, and the upper chapel of Calvary, where a stone marks the spot where Jesus’ cross stood, according to tradition.
Stängle and I sat facing it for a long time. Only a handful of oil lamps flickered in the shade of the side-by-side Catholic and Greek Orthodox spaces, with glass enclosures dividing the stone for their respective worshippers' veneration.
We also crossed paths in front of the Holy Edicule, the marble shrine erected over Jesus’ cave tomb. Three Armenian pilgrims sat solemnly in front of it until a cat strolled up and nestled at their feet, almost touching the beads of the rosary that one white-veiled woman held.
It’s at the Edicule that each night around midnight, after the ringing of the bells, the first services are held as the resident clergy start the prayers that wrap up usually around 6 a.m. That's normally when we overnighters are let out, and daytime worshippers can come in.
The reverence, said the Rev. Giuseppe Gaffurini, “enriches the Basilica.”
“You can still breathe in the presence of he who was crucified and rose from the dead," said Gaffurini, who heads the monastic community of 10 Franciscans living in rooms above the Catholic section of the church.
The Italian priest laments that the ongoing conflicts have prevented hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from attending services at the basilica. He had often admired their devotion — those touching or kissing the cold, historic stones, and those hugging each other in tears.
He remembers first visiting to chant in some of the nighttime liturgies 15 years ago. He had taken monastic vows three decades earlier, so he didn’t expect it to be a transformative experience — but it was so searing that he hasn’t left.
“The joy of the encounter at the sepulcher of the risen one erases a lifetime of fatigue and launches you forward again,” Gaffurini said.
He then retired to his room for a few hours’ sleep before the Franciscans’ dawn services started, his brown robes fading in the candlelit space.
A fellow friar from Guinea-Bissau was the first up from the Catholic order. He rang a bell and opened the Catholic chapel of the Blessed Sacrament — where Franciscans have worshipped for 700 years — so that priests of the Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Coptic rites could incense it on their around-midnight tour of the sacred spots inside the church. Ethiopian and Syrian Orthodox clergy also have clearly defined access to the church in an often controversial 19th-century arrangement.
The Franciscan, a Greek Orthodox priest and an Armenian one robed in bright red, nodded at each other as incense wafted near the Edicule. Then each started distinctive rites in rotation — an accommodating coexistence that’s a welcome change from centuries of at-times violent fights about the right to worship here.
“We’re living a particularly positive period of relationships with the other churches,” said the Rev. Francesco Ielpo, the Franciscan priest who, as Custos of the Holy Land, oversees more than 300 friars in the region ministering to the basilica and many more holy sites.
That positivity and collaboration, he says, "is, I believe, the first and most important sign to be really prophets of peace.”
Before the latest wars, the shop-filled maze of narrow alleyways that surround the church inside Jerusalem's Old City was often packed shoulder-to-shoulder with jostling pilgrims. On a 2016 trip here, the crowds were so dense I didn't even make it into the basilica's stone courtyard.
A team of archaeologists and a few groups of visitors still come in daily, crossing paths with Jews and Muslims going to pray at their respective major holy sites a few hundred meters (yards) away. For the Christian priests, nuns and monks who can be easily spotted because of their flowing robes, those encounters are increasingly tense.
But inside the church, especially in the silent wake, you're alone with your thoughts — and for Christians, with an almost tangible representation of the central tenet of the faith.
You’re locked inside a cool, dark space, on the very site where Jesus suffered a brutal form of execution, the crucifixion. And yet, to believers, this is also where that page turned — where he defeated death, leaving the promise of eternal life for the faithful.
As we sat on a bench below the Calvary chapel — across from a 17-year-old Armenian priest on one of his first nights here — I asked Gaffurini if this mystery still affected him after 15 years.
“Fifteen?” he shot back. “It would still do so after 50 years.”
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
FILE - Christian Orthodox pilgrims raise their hands towards a beam of light in front of the Edicule at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher during the ceremony of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem's Old City, Saturday, April 18, 2009. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer, File)
FILE - A priest closes the door to the Holy Sepulcher church for the night in Jerusalem on Thursday, May 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic, File)
FILE - A Christian worshipper kisses the Stone of Unction, the stone slab traditionally claimed as the stone where Jesus' body was prepared for burial, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where many Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead, in the Old City of Jerusalem, on Good Friday, March 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa, File)
FILE - Christian Orthodox pilgrims hold up candles during the Holy Fire ceremony, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem, Saturday, April 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean, File)
FILE - Christian Orthodox pilgrims hold up candles during the Holy Fire ceremony, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem, Saturday, April 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean, File)
