Mets have a Citi Field hornet’s nest waiting for Phillies

If you simply look at the cold, bloodless numbers, then it would be impossible to say, definitively, that the Phillies will be walking into a hornet’s nest the next few days, stepping into a cooking cauldron of chaos.

Citi Field, house of horrors?

According to the data, hard to build a case.

The Mets have played 11 postseason games at Citi Field since it opened in 2009. They are 5-6 in those games. The last three times they have played there with their playoff lives on the line, they lost: 7-2 in 11 innings to Kansas City in Game 5 of the 2015 World Series (aka the Matt Harvey Game); 3-0 in the NL play-in game the next year (aka the Conor Gillaspie Game), and 6-0 to San Diego in Game 3 of the 2022 wild-card series (aka the Joe Musgrove Game).

Wait, there’s more: While the Mets finished a respectable 46-35 at home this year, that was built largely on winning 12 of their last 14 games there. When they lost to the Orioles, 9-5, there on Aug. 20, their home record stood at 34-33. You could argue it was their lack of success in Queens across the season’s first five months that forced them to treat every game they played across the season’s last six weeks like elimination games.

(Which, you know … they actually were, as it turns out.)

And this: The Mets drew 2,329,999 fans to Citi Field this year. That was 11th best in the National League. That’s 1,034,413 less than the Phillies drew at Citizens Bank Park, a ballpark only about a thousand seats bigger than Citi Field. Presented another way: The Mets played in front of 1,023,761 empty seats in their 81 home dates. That’s a lot of uneaten Pat LaFrieda’s.

OK. Now that we’ve gotten that formal part of our program out of the way …

The fact is, the Phillies will be walking into a hornet’s nest on Tuesday and Wednesday. They will be stepping into a cooking cauldron. Big Game Citi Field doesn’t have the vast history Madison Square Garden does, or both Yankee Stadiums, or old Giants Stadium over in Jersey. But we do know what it sounds like when the natives are fully engaged.

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The Phillies themselves got a preview of that 2 ½ weeks ago, the last time they were here, which was also, quite remarkably, the last time the Mets were here, too. Those four games drew 164,747 customers but, as is always the case when a New York team captures the local imagination, it wasn’t the size of the crowds as much as their capacity to coerce.

Intimidating crowds guarantee nothing. We saw that twice within a couple of weeks in the spring when even the primal screams of the Garden weren’t enough to rescue the Knicks in Game 7 against the Pacers or the Rangers in Game 5 against the Panthers. The Yankees lost Game 7 against the Red Sox in 2004 on a night when they threw not only 56,129 desperate surrogates at them but also 86 years worth of ghosts and goblins, too.

(We’ll get back to you if we are ever allowed to discover what a Jets playoff crowd can do at MetLife Stadium. Promise.)

So the Mets may not win these next two games.

But believe this: The Phillies are going to have to prove themselves pretty fearless if they’re going to, at worst, guarantee a return trip to the Bank. Pros don’t rattle easily but they do rattle, they are only human. Mark Vientos spoke to being nervous in the face of a raucous weekend in Philly and he responded by hitting one rope after another. You never can know for sure about outcomes.

But you can know about atmosphere. And you can sense just how much Mets fans have been waiting for these two games. You saw them flock to Citi Field by the thousands simply to watch the game on a big-screen TV, so they could do that all as a community. If there’s a Mets fan in your life, you know what it’s been like for them as they watched the club take to the road ardently, like an old Grateful Dead tour, Atlanta-to-Milwaukee-to-Atlanta-to-Milwaukee-to Philly. Sixteen days they’ve waited.

And now they get this: Game 3, 5:08 p.m., playoff baseball in the gloamin’. We can hope the locals don’t get carried away the way the scoundrels in Los Angeles did Sunday night, tossing baseballs at Jurickson Profar, or the way the guttersnipes in Philly did a few hours before, when they booed Brandon Nimmo in the moments it appeared he might’ve been injured after a ninth-inning collision with Vientos.

We have some of those stains on our white shirts, too, though none to speak of since another Game 3 of another best-of-five, 51 years ago, when some whiskey bottles and other scattered debris were aimed at Pete Rose after he pancaked Buddy Harrelson breaking up a double play, putting a 9-2 lead in forfeit peril. Mostly, since then, New York has learned to do it the right way: loudly and within the borders of good (or at least acceptable) taste.

That’s what the Phillies are walking into. They’re good enough that it might not matter. Citi Field is going to try to make it matter anyway, starting at 5:08 p.m. Tuesday.