PHILADELPHIA — When Merrill Kelly stepped to the podium in 2023, the schadenfreude was about as high as the confidence in Philadelphia.

Kelly was scheduled to start Game 2 of the NLCS for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The journeyman righty fielded a routine question about the atmosphere at Citizens Bank Park, tossed an answer casually to first base and then watched a fanbase that assumed it was on its way to a second straight World Series erupt.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Kelly said, as a veteran of the World Baseball Classic and the KBO Korean Series. He followed it by saying that, “I haven’t obviously heard this place on the field, but I would be very surprised if it trumped that Venezuela game down in Miami,” during the WBC.

Kelly was right. Not immediately, since a day later he didn’

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