During Finnegan’s appearance on the daily baseball show “Foul Territory” the same day, former major league catcher A.J. Pierzynski asked the Washington reliever why he didn’t yet have a “fire” entrance like some of his peers.
“I’m ready for it,” Finnegan replied. “We’ve got those new LED lights at the stadium, and you’ve seen some of the stuff around the league that looks really cool. So I’m ready for whatever they throw my way.”
Finnegan referenced some of the more memorable closer entrances he has witnessed on the road, including the New York Mets’ Edwin Díaz walking out to the sound of trumpets and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Ryan Helsley taking the mound to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.”
“You feel a different energy,” Finnegan said. “It’s something special.”
The Nationals right-hander joked that he might look for inspiration for his own entrance from Kenny Powers’s over-the-top walkout in the HBO comedy series “Eastbound & Down” — “We’ve got the bullpen cart; let’s get some live animals in there,” he said — but he ultimately left the actual creative work to the professionals.
“We’ve seen everything that’s been done across the league, and we didn’t want to copy anything,” Emilee Harris, the Nationals’ director of game production and operations, said in a phone interview. “We wanted to make it his own thing.”
Closer entrances are hardly new — Trevor Hoffman and Mariano Rivera helped popularize the trend by jogging to the mound to “Hells Bells” and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” respectively, during their Hall of Fame careers — but they have become more ubiquitous and elaborate in recent years, owing partly to enhanced audiovisual capabilities at ballparks.
At the Minnesota Twins’ Target Field, the Undertaker’s bell tolls for 23 seconds, a sign flashes on the scoreboard instructing fans to turn on their phones’ flashlights before the stadium lights go out, flame graphics appear on the scoreboards, and closer Jhoan Duran makes his way to the mound.
Helsley, who led the majors with 31 saves entering Friday, has walked out to “Hells Bells” with Busch Stadium bathed in an eerie red glow since late in the 2022 season. The 29-year-old said he had no idea that Hoffman used the same song for years in San Diego.
Elsewhere, spotlights follow San Francisco Giants closer Camilo Doval to the mound at AT&T Park, and the Baltimore Orioles began using the distinctive whistle of Michael K. Williams’s Omar character in “The Wire” to signal Félix Bautista was entering the game two years ago.
Harris, who is in her 11th season with the Nationals, began developing Finnegan’s entrance by pulling the audio from his walkout song — Silverchair’s “Tomorrow” — into software that syncs music with the ballpark’s lights.
“It took a couple of days to think about what I wanted to do creatively and how we could make it really cool for Kyle and the fans,” Harris said. “Once I got the light sequence down, I was able to hand that off to our animator and motion graphics designer. He made the video to kind of match what the lights were doing.”
The Nationals debuted the new entrance May 25, when Finnegan came on to protect a 3-1 lead against the Seattle Mariners. Harris asked one of the team’s wireless camera operators to follow Finnegan as he emerged from the bullpen and aired that video on the scoreboard before starting the produced video featuring Finnegan highlights and graphics. The entrance includes roughly 20 seconds of flashing red, white and blue lights and incorporates the ballpark’s LED fascia displays (sometimes referred to as ribbon boards), which were upgraded along with the main scoreboard and lights during the offseason.
“I count it down, our DJ plays the music track, I hit the lights, the fascia operator hits the fascia, and the clips operator hits the video,” Harris said. “There are four pieces of media that have to play at the same time. The first time we did it was a 4 o’clock game, so it kind of gave us a practice run. After that, I was really excited, like, ‘Okay, this is going to work.’ And then we were just crossing our fingers for a save situation for a 7 o’clock game.”
Harris’s team has been unlucky in that respect, with five of Finnegan’s next six appearances at home since the entrance debuted coming in day games, when the light effects are less noticeable, or with the Nationals trailing. Fans noticed when Finnegan came on to preserve Washington’s 2-1 win over the Atlanta Braves on June 7, his first home save at night since May 7.
“That was sweet,” Finnegan, who has 23 saves and a 2.17 ERA, said during a postgame interview with MASN. “I kind of had some goose bumps running in there. That was really cool. They did a great job with it, and it was exciting.”
The 26,719 fans on hand for James Wood’s MLB debut Monday night were treated to the light show in a tie game, when Finnegan came on to work a perfect ninth inning in an eventual 9-7 loss to the New York Mets. Finnegan’s entrance lit up Nationals Park on each of the next two nights, including before his 23rd save Wednesday.
“We want to let our fans know that this is a big moment in the game,” said Harris, who punches up designated effects for the national anthem and after Nationals home runs and wins and created a rainbow effect for the Nationals’ annual Night Out last month. “That’s really what it’s all about and how I look at my job, not only pumping the team up but exciting the fans and giving them knowledge about baseball situations and understanding when to cheer and when to get loud.”
