PHILADELPHIA — There are certain signs, certain tells, that let a man know that he is old. Might be that twinge of pain near your Achilles tendon a half-mile into a run. Might be the realization that a Saturday night out on the town is no longer as appealing as a Saturday night on the couch with a craft beer in your hand and a college football game on your flat-screen. Might be the moment you overhear a slang-filled conversation between two teenagers and think, I need to schedule an appointment with Dr. Rick from those Progressive Insurance commercials.

Now, I’d like to think I’ve been raging against all those dying lights. In June, I turned 50, and 50 is the new 40, and 40 is the new 30, and look at that — 20 years just melted away. I still run … some. I can still hang into the morning’s wee hours once in a while. I can use Google Translate to talk to my children. I can still be cool, or I can at least still aspire to be cool. Right?

Wrong. I know I’m old, and I knew it the first time I watched Jhoan Duran, the Phillies’ closer, make his entrance from the bullpen at Citizens Bank Park.

Because I didn’t like it.

I didn’t know why I didn’t like it, not at first. It wasn’t that the entrance wasn’t entertaining, because it absolutely is, and Lord knows Major League Baseball needs to be more entertaining. It might not feel that way around here, given Kyle Schwarber’s remarkable season and the Phillies’ excellent play over the last few years, but it’s true.

We’re fortunate. The Delaware Valley is the rare region that cares deeply, always has cared deeply, and always will care deeply about its local franchise. Most markets don’t.

The reason that MLB has changed so many rules and made so many additions and tweaks in recent years — the pitch clock, the ban on shifts, the bigger bases to encourage stealing, the (abominable) ghost runner in extra innings — is that the sport had gotten stale, homogenous and dull. The athleticism, the diversity of styles of play, the swagger, and the personality that once were intrinsic to the game, that once made baseball fun, had petered away.

Duran and his entrance certainly bring swagger and personality. You’ve seen it. A bell gongs, as if to herald the arrival of The Undertaker. The park goes dark. The fans turn on their smartphones’ flashlights. A custom-mixed pump-you-up song blares from the ballpark’s speakers. Digital tarantulas scurry across the outfield video screens. Then, in jogs Duran — 6-foot-5, 230 pounds, goateed, with his 102 mph fastball and his knee-buckling knuckle curve — to lock down another Phillies victory, if all goes according to plan.

I completely understand the appeal of the production. Look at the faces of Phillies fans at CBP, especially the faces of the youngest fans, when it’s Duran time. They love it. It’s exactly the kind of participatory experience that Major League Baseball should be providing in this age of sensory overload and instant gratification. The people in the stands aren’t just watching the game when Duran comes in. They become part of the game when he comes in. I get it.

I’m just not sure that Duran has earned it. Not yet.

That’s the splinter in my brain here. The theatrics feel like an attempt to create an aura of invincibility around Duran before he has created that aura himself.

Yes, closers have used entrance music to enhance their personae, to try to foster intimidation and self-doubt in opposing hitters, for years. Trevor Hoffman had AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.” Mariano Rivera famously had Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” But they were just songs, not a stop-the-game, don’t-go-to-commercial pyrotechnic sequence that Christopher Nolan or Michael Bay could have directed, and Hoffman and Rivera were more accomplished and more reliable than Duran when they began using their trademark tunes.

Hoffman used “Hells Bells” for the first time on July 25, 1998, the day he tied the major league record for most consecutive saves — and amid a fantastic season in which he saved 53 games, nearly won the Cy Young Award, and helped the San Diego Padres reach the World Series.

Rivera had won two World Series, transitioned from being baseball’s best setup man to its best closer, and had allowed just two runs in 35 postseason innings before the Yankees started blasting “Enter Sandman” for him in 1999. As Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction would have said, if you heard that music, that meant your a—.

Despite his electric stuff, Duran doesn’t possess that same mystique yet. He was a terrific closer for three years with the Minnesota Twins, though aside from five scoreless innings in the 2023 American League wild-card and divisional rounds, you might not have noticed him. The Twins otherwise were irrelevant.

Since the Phillies’ acquisition of him in late July at the trade deadline, he already has blown three saves in 18 appearances — a recent track record that doesn’t scream Indefatigable Greatness as much as it does, Well, let’s see how this guy does when the games matter most.

It’s that factor that irks me about Duran’s entrance. It’s the presumptuousness of it. It’s the implication that Duran deserves this extravaganza not because he had a perfect season like Brad Lidge, but simply because he and the franchise assert that he deserves it. It’s the expectation that the Phillies’ opponents will do their part and tremble before him.

The Undertaker’s ringing bell is an appropriate sound effect; Duran takes the field in the style not of a professional athlete but of a professional wrestler. But pro wrestling, at its core, is a performance, one with a predetermined ending, with good guys and bad guys sticking to their roles and staying in character. A baseball game is a competition. Its outcome is uncertain.

Come the National League Divisional Series, there will be 26 major league ballplayers in the visiting dugout at Citizens Bank Park, and just like everyone else, they’ll be watching the lights go out and the spiders start crawling … except they’ll have the ability and the opportunity to ruin the whole show, and after sitting through a spectacle that reduces them to bit players on the stage, they might just be a little more motivated to stick it to Jhoan Duran and the Phillies.

Maybe it’s the old man in me, but I can’t say I’d blame them.

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