From the beginning, the 44,093 people in attendance were loud and joyful, eager to squeeze out the last drops of summer and join us for a late-afternoon October baseball experience. they were standing. they chanted. They roared every time Sean Manaea pitched a great inning of seven or more innings. They roared when Pete Alonso went deep, and then when Jesse Winker went deep.
And Ryne Stanek struck out Cody Clemens, clinching a 7-2 Mets win and pushing the Mets within one game of the National League Championship Series and pushing the hated Phillies a few steps back. Then they really cried out to heaven. Approaching the abyss. Even if it's not the loudest Citi Field has ever been, it's definitely the talk of the town.
The loudest moment so far was October 30, 2015. The Mets were already two games behind the Royals and had already lost 1-0 in Game 3 of the World Series. Citi Field was already gearing up for this moment, with games against the Dodgers in the NLDS and Cubs in the NLCS.
Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post
The Dodgers were successful in their split. The Cubs never recovered from the initial thunderstorm and never took the lead until the 18th inning.
But now Mets fans were desperate. And when Curtis Granderson led off with a single in the bottom of the first inning, the roar that was already pulsating began to grow louder. And grow. And grow. That's because David Wright was strolling toward the bat.
For Wright, Citi Field's initial large area was a major disadvantage. Wright moved in with the fence shortened. Wright missed three months of the 2015 season due to a back injury that forced him to retire from the game at age 35, but he returned to play the full game in September. And now he was enjoying every moment of what was his only World Series.
And the 44,781 fans inside City were also enjoying the moment.
But this one in particular was Yordano Ventura's strike one to right field. The Royals' scouting report hinted that Wright was probably not as skilled at catching up to good fastballs. Ventura had a good fastball. He threw it high into the air at 96 mph toward Wright's letter.
The light waved.
What happened next… Go ahead and look in your thesaurus and find all the words that are equivalent to “noisy”. Go ahead and go to 'e' and look up everything you can find about 'emotional'. Wright wasn't the type to add mustard to his home runt lot, but he was going to give this one a taste. And so did the crowd. What they communicated in that moment still applies today.
It was the loudest moment in Citi Field history.
There were several like this at Shea Stadium. As it turned out, Shea twice witnessed the 27th out of the game that decided the World Series title. In Game 5 in 1969, Cleon Jones pushed Davey Johnson's fly ball to left. In 1986, Jesse Orozco struck out Marty Barrett and shut out Game 7. They won home pennants in 1969, '73 and 2000, and district titles in '69, '86, '88 and '06. And when Shea broke out in the big game, the fundamentals shook along with everything else.
Keith Hernandez once said: “If you took one look at the upper deck during a game, you would be surprised that it didn't fall over. There was a time when I really thought it might. It felt like being inside the engine of a 747. ”
On Tuesday night, Hernandez threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the Phillies-Mets division series, the Mets' first postseason home game of the year and the first home game of the year. They wanted to bring back the old-fashioned hustle and bustle to Citi Field. Anything you want in 16 days. It was part of a day of color and glitz that should serve as the Mets' reign for the season, no matter how long it lasts.
In fact, in the Mets' 63 seasons in the National League, very little has happened recently. Tuesday was only the 12th playoff game City has ever hosted at home. Add in the 39 games they played at Shea, and you have a total of 51 playoff games in their history. In contrast, the Yankees played 55 games at Yankee Stadium in nine seasons from 1996 to 2004.
So if the Mets and their fans act as if they've never been there…well, at least compared to the Yankees, they haven't. And they were going to celebrate the grimace. They were going to walk around holding up “OMG” signs. They were going to cheer for Hernandez, but a lot of old Mets appeared on the scoreboard and were almost as loud as the Mets on the field.
Mets fans have learned to never take things for granted. They were going to have fun with this.
