From the start, the 44,093 in the house were loud, they were joyous, they wanted to take part in the experience of late-afternoon, October baseball, squeezing a few last drops out of summer. They stood. They chanted. They roared with every pitch Sean Manaea threw across seven-plus brilliant innings. They roared when Pete Alonso went deep, and Jesse Winker later on.
And they really lent their voices to the sky when Ryne Stanek struck out Kody Clemens to put this 7-2 Mets victory in the books, to nudge the Mets within one game of the National League Championship Series, to nudge the hated Phillies a few steps closer to the abyss. If it wasn’t the loudest Citi Field has ever been, it’s certainly in the conversation.
Till now, the loudest moment had been Oct. 30, 2015. The Mets were already down two games to none to the Royals, and already down 1-0 in Game 3 of the World Series. Citi Field had already warmed up for this moment by bringing the noise against the Dodgers in the NLDS and the Cubs in the NLCS.
The Dodgers had managed a split. The Cubs never recovered from the initial wave of thunder, never once led in 18 innings.
But now Mets fans were desperate. And when Curtis Granderson led off the bottom of the first inning with a single, what was already a pulsing roar began to grow. And grow. And grow. For David Wright was strolling to the plate.
Wright, for whom Citi Field’s vast early dimensions had been a great disservice. Wright, for whom those fences were shortened and moved in. Wright, who’d missed three months of that 2015 season with the back issues that would force him from the game at age 35, who’d returned to fully partake in the September stretch run and was now enjoying every moment of what turned out to be his only World Series.
And the fans inside Citi, 44,781 of them, were enjoying those moments, too.
But especially this one: Yordano Ventura got strike one on Wright. The Royals scouting report had hinted that maybe Wright wasn’t all that adept at catching up to good fastballs. Ventura had a good fastball. He threw it high, at Wright’s letters, 96 miles per hour.
Wright swung.
And what happened next … well, go ahead and dig into your thesaurus for all the words that you can sub for “loud.” Go ahead and move to “e” and look up whatever you can find for “emotional.” Wright wasn’t one to add extra mustard to his home run trots but he was going to savor this one. And so was the crowd. What they delivered in that moment still holds true to today.
It was the loudest moment in Citi Field history.
Shea Stadium had a few like this. Twice, after all, Shea bore witness to the 27th out of a game that clinched a World Series title — Cleon Jones squeezing Davey Johnson’s fly ball to left in Game 5, 1969; Jesse Orosco striking out Marty Barrett to close out Game 7 in 1986. They clinched pennants at home in 1969, ’73 and 2000, and division titles in ’69, ’86, ’88 and 2006. And when Shea rocked during big games, the foundation shook along with everything else.
“You would steal a glance at the upper deck during those games,” Keith Hernandez once marveled, “and it would surprise you that it didn’t come tumbling down. There were times I really thought that might happen. It was like being inside the engine of a 747.”
Tuesday night Hernandez tried to bring that old-school din back to Citi Field when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of this Phillies-Mets Division Series, the Mets’ first postseason home game of the year, their first home game of any kind in 16 long days. That was part of a day of color and pageantry that ought to serve as a valedictory for this Mets season, no matter how long it lasts.
The fact is, there have been precious little of these days in the 63 seasons the Mets have graced the National League. Tuesday was only the 12th home playoff game Citi has ever hosted; add the 39 they played at Shea and you have a grand total of 51 playoff games in that history. By contrast, the Yankees played 55 games at Yankee Stadium in the nine seasons from 1996-2004.
So if the Mets and their fans act as if they’ve never been there before … well, at least compared to the Yankees, they haven’t. And so they were going to celebrate Grimace. They were going to walk around with their “OMG” signs. They were going to cheer for Hernandez and however many old Mets appeared on the scoreboard, almost as loud as the Mets on the field.
Mets fans have learned never to take too much for granted. They were going to enjoy this.
