Jhoan Durán was one of the prizes of a busy trade deadline, moving from the suddenly tanking Twins to a Phillies team in a dogfight with the very best of the National League. Durán is not just an electric arm, but a very marketable one as well. Along with his 2.01 ERA in 49 games with Minnesota, the closer arrived in Pennsylvania with his own A/V package. According to The Athletic, the Twins sent over all the assets that the Phillies would need to recreate the entrance that Durán's old club gave him at their home field. That package includes lights, music, and an animation of a tarantula (Durántula) crawling across a video board.
"We collectively thought, ‘This is for the greater good of baseball fans,’" said Dustin Morse, Twins VP of communications. "This is a fun atmosphere. All baseball fans should get to see it and experience it. We all know that the atmosphere at Citizens Bank is already nuts. This would go over well."
Sooner or later, Durán is going to blow a save and get booed by the most proudly overstated fans in baseball. But for now, so far, so good. He's needed just 16 pitches to take care of six batters across two games, sealing a pair of close wins for his new club against the Detroit Tigers over the weekend. Both times, on Friday and Sunday, Durán entered in the ninth to tremendous fanfare. Even ESPN, taking the Sunday night game, went the extra mile for his entrance, staving off those sweet, sweet commercials for a few seconds so viewers could get the whole Durán experience. Those who knew the hype around Durán but had yet to see his explosive showmanship in action got to watch in awe as ... actually, nothing much happened. There were some lights and some music, but I guess you had to be there. (To be fair, the fans that were there seemed into it, at least in terms of following the instruction to have their phones ready.) Whatever is special about Durán's entrance did not really come across in this footage.
I think a lot of the misplaced hype for this show comes from the fact that Durán is the first cool closer in Phillies history. When you're comparing the energy he brings in the ninth inning to, say, Jonathan Papelbon grimacing and squinting in the 2010s, you're grading on a curve. But the real issue with this production is that at a modern baseball game, there is always artificial noise. Playing music for a pitching change doesn't really register at all; turning the lights out is fine, but not remotely revolutionary. Some teams do that for their set-up guys now, which may or may not be hype inflation but is a fact. For context, here is the light show the rival Mets produce when the other team changes pitchers, where they drop the beat on the "Stand clear of the closing doors" subway message:
That's not to mention the big hullabaloo that franchise puts on for Edwin Diaz's relief entrances. They're similiar to Durán's in every way but one: the now-ubiquitous trumpet line that blasts itself into your brain and sticks around long after all the other generic ballpark noise has faded away.
Durán has a show, no doubt, but it's one that the Phillies could easily adapt to their next closer. Unlike Diaz's routine, or Felix Bautista's "Mountain Time," or Mariano Rivera jogging to the mound at Yankee Stadium to "Enter Sandman," the frenzy around Durán's appearances feels less like something he owns and more like a gimmick constructed around him out of fragments of other successful closer gimmicks. His name is Durán, for god's sake, and you couldn't get him a standout signature song? You had to go with the most played-out choices imaginable? Even the sound effect of the bell is lifted from Trevor Hoffman. You're telling me that, in the 27 years since the Padres first used "Hell's Bells," you weren't able to come up with anything that wasn't already taken?
There is no question in my mind that the Durán Experience has been a flop for Philly, but thankfully there is a solution: Keep the spider, ditch everything else, and put Durán in a Mets uniform. They'll give him something better.
