Growing up in Australia, the musician Timothy Smith — stage name: Timmy Trumpet — knew little of baseball. Cricket was his closest brush with the sport.
Smith speaks in heavy Aussie accent, and he calls the field a “pitch.” When he stepped onto it wielding his black-and-gold trumpet Tuesday afternoon in New York, he revealed that he had never seen a live baseball game.
But now Smith is forever linked with Mets closer Edwin Díaz, whose success this season has turned his entrance music — “Narco,” by Smith and the Dutch DJ Blasterjaxx — into a phenomenon. Before Díaz enters games at Citi Field, stadium operators turn off the lights to prep fans for the first strains of trumpets. The Mets broadcast no longer cuts to commercial, instead following Díaz with a camera on his journey from the bullpen to the mound. In the stands, fans dance and play imaginary trumpets or souvenir ones made of foam. At home, social media pulses to the same rhythm.
Then Díaz takes the mound and, more often than not, dominates.
