![]() ![]() To witness Díaz trot in from the bullpen in August is to imagine what the scene would feel like in October. If Mets fans once fretted about the prospects sent to Seattle to acquire Díaz and Canó, it is now impossible to imagine the franchise without the prospect of trumpets sounding before the ninth inning. “He’s been able to kind of reinvent himself and really just maximize what he can do,” first baseman Pete Alonso told reporters earlier this month. I think you can do better again in New York with the trumpet.” “You should use the trumpet again,” Díaz recalled his wife saying. Díaz struggled in his first season in New York, logging a 5.59 ERA in 66 appearances, and perhaps it was a coincidence that he’d stopped warming up to “Narco.” But when the 2020 season rolled around, his wife Nashaly had an idea. Before the 2019 season, he was traded to the Mets, along with Robinson Canó, in a seven-player deal. “It’s unique, something different than everybody.”ĭíaz kept the song for all of 2018, posting a 1.97 ERA and making his first All-Star Game. “When I heard it, it felt like a bullfight,” Greene said. Another was “Shut It Down” by Party Favor and Dillon Francis. One day at spring training in 2018, he pulled Díaz aside and played him three songs on his phone. Greene - who began his career in baseball as a DJ at the Kingdome - spent the offseason searching for songs in similar EDM and house genres, tracks with a similar feel to “Watch Out For This,” and then made a short Spotify playlist. That lasted through the 2017 season, but Gregg Greene, the Mariners’ vice president of marketing, was ready to mix things up. Next, they found a remix version of a song by electronic dance music group Major Lazer (“Watch Out For This”) that featured upbeat horns. The Mariners first tried to leverage Díaz’s nickname (“Sugar”) and opted for Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” but Díaz didn’t love the sound. “On the other hand, it makes absolutely no sense at all.”) “We just put them in.”) And they came up with a title, a nod to the popular Netflix show “Narcos,” whose third season debuted months before the song was released. (“We didn’t even listen to what the lyrics said or whatever,” Jongkind said. ![]() ![]() They added a short rap verse, which came from an old batch of loops and samples they had purchased long before. Makhlaf had to figure out the “drop,” that key moment in dance music when a new beat kicks in. I’ve written and recorded hundreds of riffs in my lifetime, but I knew ‘Narco’ was special the day I recorded it.” “That’s why nursery rhymes live on for centuries. “I’ve been playing the trumpet all my life so I know its strengths and strong riffs stand the test of time,” Smith wrote in an email. Once there, they played some demos, and Smith had an idea: What if they took out the flute melody and he played it on the trumpet? Jongkind and Makhlaf had long wanted to collaborate with Smith, so they invited him to the studio. Then, in early 2017, Timmy Trumpet - whose given name is Timothy Jude Smith - happened to be touring in Europe and had a day off. But next, they layered on a calypso melody that sounded like what Jongkind described as an “Arabic flute.” It was catchy, but a little experimental. When Jongkind and Makhlaf first sat down to work on the track that would eventually become “Narco,” they were looking for a big sound “specifically for the dance floor,” Jongkind said, something that would be “a bit groovy in the breakdown that kept the tension going.” Which is how they started with the percussive, synthy beat in the song’s intro. “There’s so much coincidence in this track.”įor instance: The original demo of the song didn’t even have trumpets. And so, one day earlier this week, Jongkind and his partner Idir Makhlaf, 30, were on a video chat from their home base in The Hague, Netherlands, to help answer a simple question: How did three musicians - two from the Netherlands, one from Australia - create the perfect closer’s entrance song, a genre classic that stands with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” (Mariano Rivera) or AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” (Trevor Hoffman)? One Mets official mused that the song not only changed everything for Díaz but also for the entire Mets franchise. The Mets’ local broadcast on SNY went viral while creating a cinematic entrance video. Mets manager Buck Showalter has delayed a late-game bathroom break so as not to miss Díaz and the trumpets. ![]() Four years later, the song is a full-blown phenomenon, a pulsating, trumpet-blasting anthem that has carried Díaz to his best season in New York - and the Mets to the top of the National League East. The following spring, the song became the entrance music for Díaz, who was in his third season with the Seattle Mariners. Jongkind, 32, is one member of the music duo Blasterjaxx, the Dutch electro house group which - along with collaborator Timmy Trumpet - released the single “Narco” in the fall of 2017. ![]()
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