So Quiet, So Loud

The sound of one hand clapping makes about as much noise as a batter facing Jacob deGrom. Yet at Citi Field when Jacob deGrom pitches, all the hands clap and the noise overwhelms. Not as much as Jake overwhelms. Little can outdo deGrom in that regard.

We bring the sound. Jake brings the fury. The Phillies, like every opponent, bring the best of intentions. Good luck, fellas, I’d tell them, albeit without sincerity. I wish you long, happy, healthy lives, yet in the spirit of full disclosure, nothing but ill will at the plate, in the field or on the mound. On the mound, you’ve been pretty good yourselves for two nights. In the field, you’ve appeared determined to make a certain color analyst recant all the sighs and groans and “throw a tent over that circus” he’s directed at your (until recently) ludicrous leatherwork. But at the plate, you’re still facing Jacob deGrom, and he intends to give you nothing. I doubt the Phillies wanted to see deGrom any more than Keith Hernandez wanted to see the Phillies.

Saturday night at Son of Shea — not only was Citi ramped up to a vintage volume, but my literal vantage point brought to the mind’s eye a way of seeing a game that hasn’t existed since Citi Field was under construction — everybody pitched as well as could be asked from a baseline perspective. Let’s put it this way: Edwin Diaz was, by default, the least impressive of the five arms throwing baseballs for either side, and he gave up neither a run nor a hit en route to notching another enormous save.

Diaz is saved for last. DeGrom throws the first pitch of any home game he works. He appears, we go wild. Not that we needed much of a cue, but once those of us who weren’t in the park last Sunday took in the ace’s warmup on TV, we recognized how special it is just to watch Jake throw the pitches that don’t count. Now we understand those as our portal to deGrominant immersion. Once he gets going for real, against professional victims, our impulse is to segue from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” to the Dovells’ “You Can’t Sit Down,” except you probably have to sit down, lest the people behind you shame you in a shower of DOWN IN FRONTs.

I mentioned my vantage point. As noted earlier Saturday, Stephanie and I had the honor and pleasure of joining our friends the Spectors at their 27th (25 + 2) anniversary party, thrown at the hottest joint in town, Citi Field. Specifically, we were in the Seaver Suite on the Empire Level. It’s down the right field line, befitting one of the greatest righthanders in baseball history. And what better spiritual post than the Seaver Suite from which to watch the greatest righthander in contemporary baseball?

If you could see the mound Saturday, you saw everything.

The only issue with the suite life from a viewing standpoint, at least on this occasion in short right field, was if you didn’t elbow out other swell people from the allotted outdoor seating (which we didn’t), you needed to plant yourself at a proper angle to take in as much as you could, cognizant that you had to prioritize. Citi Field geometry almost always subtracts something from your line of sight wherever you sit or stand. Here, the shortfalls in geometry were leavened by magically refilling trays of sliders, franks and fries, free-flowing beverages and the delight of mingling among an array of fine folks in air-conditioned comfort (even Garry and Susan’s Phillies fan friends seemed swell), which is to say who’s complaining if you can’t see the scoreboards or certain swaths of grass? If anything, the experience took me back to those stolen glances from the old subway platform extension, the one demolished prior to the final year of the old ballpark to clear space for the coming new ballpark. You might retroactively refer to it as the original Shea bridge, leading down a spiral staircase to the token booth rotunda. You couldn’t see everything from up there, but you could see enough.

My spot in the suite got me in line with Jacob’s delivery. If you could watch deGrom form his motion and fire, you saw everything you needed to see. That and the plate, where Phillie after Phillie was phlummoxed. That was the fun and game there. My Log tells me this was the 24th time I’ve seen Jake pitch at Citi Field. I don’t know that I was ever quite so focused on him (between burger bites) or nearly as blown away. He must look like hell from the batter’s box.

My seat was a tall bar stool that I staked out a little corner for. It allowed me to rest between pitches, because during pitches, I was up on my feet. There was just enough space for me to pace anxiously without making too much of an obstacle of myself. “Can’t Sit Down” didn’t apply to the Phillies. For six innings — the moderate workload wasn’t surprising despite the sudden appearance of Seth Lugo in the top of the seventh jarring me off of my chair — Philadelphia batters returned to their seats with alacrity.

We roared, Jake released, and nothing happened except exquisite pitching brilliance. Rhys Hoskins singled in the first only to be erased on a forceout. Bryson Stott lined a single to center only to be stranded when Hoskins struck out to end the sixth. And that was the entirety of the Phililes’ offense. No extra-base hits. No walks. Nothing threatening. Ten strikeouts in all.

The third strikes were so much fun to watch. Wow, they really are helpless against him, just like on TV. The occasional fly ball I didn’t really feel the need to follow (which would have necessitated neck-craning and such). I could tell what he was throwing wasn’t traveling too far or in much danger of falling in. I was in sync with Jake. My pacing didn’t drive him off kilter. My frequent applause was just a fraction of the supportive din.

You almost didn’t notice Aaron Nola crafting a gem of his own. At first, you didn’t have to, because the Mets cobbled a run together in their first ups. Starling Marte, as if to make up for Friday night’s ill-advised dash for home, built three-quarters of a run himself by singling, stealing and taking third on a throw into center. Pete Alonso brought him in ASAP.

That was the extent of what Nola gave up. It was too much of a hole to dig against deGrom, but whereas Jake departed after six (it was still only his third start of the year after thirteen months of major league inactivity, you had to keep telling yourself), Nola hung in there. No reason to lift him and no pitcher is pinch-hit for anymore. The Mets’ output after the first was as meager as the Phillies’ through the sixth, leading to the only foreseen drama of the evening. Would we be able to span the gap from deGrom to Diaz?

Seth materialized in the seventh and simply by not being Jake, he was the best chance of the visitors’ night. There was indeed a base hit, via Nick Castellanos’s single, but it came with the bases empty and two out and it was followed immediately by a strikeout. Trevor May succeeded Lugo, resembling the May we heard so much about in his pre-Met incarnation (a little like Diaz the Mariner needing time to find a holistic comfort level in New York, perhaps). Trevor notched two Ks, then didn’t falter when Kyle Schwarber lifted a ball to center. It was caught by Brandon Nimmo, leaving the score Mets 1 Phillies 0. That’s also where Nola left it when he completed his eighth inning of almost spotless work. It occurred to me that if all went well, I’d just seen a complete game thrown by a pitcher on the losing side.

We just needed all to go well. We’ve reached a stage in our lives as fans that we expect all to go well when it’s Diaz time. It’s a 180 from where we sat in 2019 and probably a 135 from where our hearts stubbornly positioned themselves before the reality of 2022 fully kicked in. Edwin’s stats improved so much in 2021 and glittered in the right light in 2020, yet you never really stop mistrusting your closer unless your closer convinces you to do otherwise. Edwin Diaz has become the most convincing Met closer I’ve ever known. The only thing that could mess with the tableau unfolding ahead of the ninth — there’s no DOWN IN FRONT-ing for the raucous “Narco” entrance, because everybody’s up and everybody’s loud — was the looming inevitability of an eventual lesser outing from the master of the three-batter save, that vague but palpable sense of it has to happen sometime. As much as Citi Field throbbed for Jake, it pulsated for Sugar. Their noise’s common denominator was confidence. We turn up the volume because they’ve supplied the certainty, excitement born of trust. Still, you couldn’t completely bar from your head that one nagging question, especially with the thinnest of 1-0 leads, even after Lugo and May had quelled the initial wave of post-Jake doubt.

Would Saturday night be the night the trumpets hit a sour note?

I inserted myself into the suite’s official seating section to get the most expansive view available. Edwin Diaz was not immaculate. He did not flirt with perfection. He didn’t even strike out the first guy he faced, relying instead on Luis Guillorme to field a ground ball and fire it to Alonso for the first out. Then he walked Hoskins, whose pinch runner Edmundo Sosa stole second pretty easily. Alec Bohm flied out to right, which could have been a tag-up problem had Marte not made a strong throw into the infield. Then J.T. Realmuto walked on three-and-two, bringing up Castellanos. It would take seven pitches — during which there’d be a double steal that amounted to defensive indifference in a 1-0 nailbiter because Edwin would not be distracted by baserunning hijinks — but we never for a moment vocalized an iota of regret that we’re all in on Edwin. The closer was trusted to close a one-run lead with runners on second and third amid nary a boo. Our anxiety in the moment was empathetic rather than accusatory. That particular vibe in the ninth inning at a home Mets game has been rare since the Shea subway extension stood. It was by no means common then, either.

The end result was what we sought, and it was multifaceted:

Diaz struck out Castellanos.
Diaz saved the win for deGrom.
Diaz maintained our affection.
The Mets cooled the surging Phillies’ aspirations for one night.
The Let’s Go Metsing was as strong as ever on the short staircase trip from Empire Level to Field Level.
And on the LIRR home, east of Jamaica, no less, we heard “Narco” cranked up on somebody’s phone…and it wasn’t even mine.

The game was long over, but the melody lingered on. Timmy Trumpet blows. Edwin Diaz doesn’t.

Across nineteen innings, these two teams have pitched each other to a 2-2 tie. It doesn’t shake out that way in the standings, but maybe aesthetically should. One night, Ranger Suarez & Co. barely outpointed a Max Scherzer-led mound initiative that was effective enough to have prevailed most nights; and the next night Aaron Nola stayed within a shoelace tip of the deGrom-to-Diaz super express, one that made stops at Lugo and May without encountering delays. Tight games both. From our perspective, the second was the keeper. It looked great from where I stood. It sounded even better.