As dominant as Edwin Diaz has been for the New York Mets this season — and as much as he’s become a pop culture phenomenon with his entrance song “Narco” — his performance as a closer and popularity beyond baseball is not unprecedented in the Big Apple.
Mariano Rivera became synonymous with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” while racking up a record 652 saves and posting a 0.70 ERA and 42 more saves in the playoffs while helping the Yankees win five championships.
A generation earlier, Sparky Lyle became the first American League reliever to win the Cy Young by going 13-5 with a 2.17 ERA and 26 saves in 1977 while helping the Yankees win their first championship since 1962. Two years later, Lyle’s “The Bronx Zoo” — a diary of the Yankees’ tumultuous title-winning 1978 season — turned into a national best-seller.
And the sight of tens of thousands of people at Citi Field miming trumpets when Diaz enters is reminiscent of the 2000 season, when tens of thousands of people at Shea Stadium would bark in unison as Armando Benitez entered to “Who Let The Dogs Out?”
But no baseball player in New York has ever mounted a comeback from a disastrous first act like Diaz, whose performances are can’t-miss affairs — even for managers who have to use the bathroom — three years after a nightmarish first season with the Mets.
“He went through the cauldron here,” said former Mets catcher and Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, who knows a thing or two about being booed during a debut season in New York. “It was like he literally had two feet out the door, everyone was ready to give up on him and he was struggling and — boom — just was able to turn it around.”
With a 1.30 ERA, 27 saves in 28 chances and a whopping 96 strikeouts in 48 1/3 innings — a rate of 17.9 strikeouts per nine innings, currently the highest of all-time by any pitcher who’s thrown at least 40 innings — Diaz is putting together one of the greatest campaigns ever by a closer. And while it’s unlikely he’ll become the 10th reliever to win the Cy Young or the fifth to earn the Most Valuable Player award, he’s a near-lock to be among the top five or 10 vote-getters for each honor, respectively.
“I’m really happy right now,” Diaz said last week. “I’m helping the team to win every time. I’m doing my job. That’s my job. I want to win every time. My career here didn’t start the way I wanted, the way everybody wanted, but I turned it around.”
Diaz and Piazza are underselling just how badly things went for Diaz in 2019. Already performing in front of an audience skeptical about the trade that brought him to New York — Diaz and Robinson Cano, the latter of whom was coming off a PED suspension and due more than $100 million over the next five seasons, were acquired from the Seattle Mariners in a blockbuster that sent top prospect Jarred Kelenic to the Pacific Northwest — Diaz was loudly booed at Citi Field while going 2-7 with a 5.59 ERA. He blew seven of his 33 save chances and gave up a whopping 15 homers in just 58 innings.
Mets manager Buck Showalter wasn’t managing in 2019, but as the former skipper of the Yankees, he’s got a unique understanding of what Diaz’s first season might have been like and how it might have contributed to his struggles.
“Edwin’s, what, 28? He came in here at what, 26, 25?” Showalter said. “And first time you’d ever been traded — all of a sudden, you get traded from Seattle to New York City at a young age. I guarantee if you go back, look at some of the factors, it probably shouldn’t surprise you as much.”
While the back story and propensity to serve up homers were easily explained — the ball was turbo-juiced in 2019 and made it difficult for Diaz to get a grip when throwing his slider — Diaz was still in the nearly impossible position of trying to win back a market that never forgets poor first impressions or failures in the biggest of spots.
The name Ed Whitson — who couldn’t pitch at Yankee Stadium and got into a knockdown drag-out barroom brawl with manager Billy Martin — is still a four-letter word for a generation of Yankees fans. Joey Gallo didn’t self-destruct anywhere nearly as badly as Whitson, but 12 months in pinstripes was enough to realize it was never going to get better.
The only thing worse for the Mets than Bobby Bonilla’s first stint in pinstripes was his second. And while Benitez was the most dominant Mets closer of their first four decades, his tenure is defined by the ill-timed blown saves he absorbed against the Yankees in Game 1 of the 2000 World Series and against the Braves in the 1999 NL Championship Series and down the stretch of the 2001 regular season.
Given what they spent to acquire Diaz — who was acquired four seasons before he was due to hit free agency — the Mets had little choice but to retain him as closer in 2020 and 2021, when he went a solid 7-7 with a 2.95 ERA with 38 saves in 48 chances while averaging 14.2 strikeouts per nine innings.
A pair of unrelated yet pivotal events — Kelenic has hit just .167 in 450 at-bats for the Mariners and the Wilpon family sold the Mets to Steve Cohen, who recognizes the term “sunk cost” and thus wouldn’t keep the declining and two-time PED offender Cano in the lineup just because he was making $24 million — also helped soften the initial reaction to the trade and Diaz.
Still, the default reaction within #MetsTwitter was to recoil in fear anytime Diaz came into a close game. But that fear has been replaced by anticipation since May 27, the game after Diaz was charged with his second blown save of the season. In his last 29 games, Diaz is 1-0 with 17 saves in as many tries while allowing just 17 baserunners — 12 hits and five walks — and whiffing 62 batters in 29 2/3 innings.
“He knows he believes in himself, he knows how good his stuff is,” said Mets reliever Adam Ottavino, a native of Brooklyn who played for the Yankees from 2019-20. “He knows that was kind of a fluky situation that year with the homers and stuff. But to go out and just put your stamp on it continuously the next few years and become the guy that the fans want to see in that game obviously speaks a lot to his character.”
Diaz’s entrance to “Narco” is a cinematic event at Citi Field, where the scoreboard goes dark and the sound system turns silent until Diaz emerges from the bullpen and begins jogging lightly on the balls of his feet — just as Rivera once did to “Enter Sandman.”
SNY has recently begun to bring the experience to living rooms throughout the tri-state area by televising Diaz’s trot to the mound.
“I was going to go get something to drink, whatever, I might have been going to the bathroom before the ninth inning,” Showalter said Aug. 9. “And yesterday I said you know what, I think I’m going to stay here and watch this.”
For all of Diaz’s dominance this season, the most telling moments have been the times when he hasn’t had an easy go of the opposing lineup. Diaz mishandled a comebacker by Aaron Judge to bring up the potential tying run in the ninth inning against the Yankees on July 26. But Diaz laughed at himself before closing out the save by striking out the next two batters — Anthony Rizzo and Gleyber Torres — on a total of seven pitches.
Closers are creatures of habit, but when “Narco” didn’t play upon Diaz entering in the eighth inning Aug. 3, he hummed the song to himself while jogging to the mound and recorded the first six-out save of his professional career in a 6-4 win over the Atlanta Braves. And last Saturday against the Philadelphia Phillies, Diaz issued a pair of walks but struck out Nick Castellanos to strand two runners in scoring position and close out a 1-0 win.
In those moments, Showalter and Piazza see the pitcher who is applying the lessons he learned in 2019 — and came out on the other side to author perhaps the most surprising and dominant resurgence in New York baseball history.
“Once you get a toehold here and you realize that you’ve got to come in there with your guard up every time (and) you’ve got to be ready for the competition — it’s remarkable, the consistency in a very hard job,” Showalter said. “And he ain’t sneaking up on anybody. Those guys feel like they’re playing with house money when they hit off him. They’re just — they’re letting it fly.”
“Pitching is mechanics, but you also have the intestinal fortitude to really get through a tough time,” Piazza said. “It would have been the easiest thing for him to roll over and say ‘I can’t pitch here, I need to go figure it out, go to somewhere else.’ But it shows a lot of character. Now he’s almost unhittable.
“If things come easy for you and then you struggle a little bit, sometimes you may not be able to handle it. So the fact that he did struggle and now he’s having success, he knows you still have to stay focused and never take anything for granted. It’s a very good story, no question about it.”
