Mets fans have waited for this chance to be loud once again
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 t...