For the uninitiated, it will look like a crisis. For the faithful, it will be the moment of inevitable triumph.

At some point this weekend, if all goes to plan, the lights of Citizens Bank Park will go dark. The speakers will become eerily silent. Small fires will ignite and spread, engulfing not only the outfield wall but also the upper decks and giant Liberty Bell. As it burns, the bell will toll with tones loud and ominous. Giant spiders will creep through the flames.

All around, the people immersed in this apocalyptic hellscape will hold their phones aloft and scream while one man enters the field of play, his last name shining amid the blaze.

That’s the way Philadelphia Phillies closer Jhoan Duran jogs into a baseball game.

Like Mad Max driving through a sandstorm or The Undertaker marching into WrestleMania, Duran’s entrance is both primal and theatrical, immersive and extravagant. The entire spectacle became a part of the deal when the Phillies traded for Duran at the deadline, and its digital flames will never burn brighter than in the month of October.

Relief pitchers might be the underappreciated ditch diggers of baseball’s regular season, but they are marquee difference makers in the playoffs. As the Division Series get underway on Saturday, relievers will be asked to do more in the coming weeks than at any other time of the year. They will be scrutinized and celebrated more than usual, and modern technology will allow these guardians of late-inning leads — especially the game’s most established closers — to arrive like true rock stars, if those rock stars were also comic book heroes and professional wrestlers. The bullpen entrance has become a status symbol for those responsible for the last three outs.

“The closer has now transcended into that,” two-time Reliever of the Year Liam Hendriks said.

New York Mets closer Edwin Díaz helped usher in this era of larger-than-life ninth-inning entrances with his Timmy Trumpet extravaganza. In the coming weeks, Rogers Centre will glow purple for the Thanos-themed entrance of Toronto Blue Jays closer Jeff Hoffman. The Yankee Stadium ribbon boards will pulse for trade deadline acquisition David Bednar. T-Mobile Park will sound an alarm as Seattle Mariners All-Star Andrés Muñoz enters to exploding pyrotechnics, flashing lights, and pulsing rhythm befitting a music festival DJ.

Such multimedia bombast was not possible during the heyday of Hall of Fame relievers Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman, whose entrances were iconic but almost entirely musical. Today’s top closers walk into a stadium that looks more like a big-budget action movie.

“They’re different times, different eras,” said Phillies reliever David Robertson, a former teammate of Rivera and current setup man to Duran. “Mariano’s, like, you just kind of knew it was over because he’d been doing it for so long. But Duran’s is just different. The crowd’s in it. The phones are out. The lights are going crazy. They’re both really good.”

Both are good, but it’s like comparing a personal computer from 1985 to the latest edition smartphone. One set the standard and changed the game, but the other just does so much more.

“I kind of think,” Robertson admitted, “Duran’s is a little bit cooler.”

Of course it is. Rivera had the cutter, but he didn’t have the technology. Modern sound systems, computer programs and lighting systems — it’s mostly the lights — make immersive entrances like Duran’s possible.

Mark DiNardo, the Phillies’ director of broadcasting and video services, came to the team in 2006 after working previously for the Flyers and 76ers. He remembers when stadium lights needed 20 minutes of warmup to achieve full brightness and it was nearly impossible to make an entire ballpark go dark without waiting almost a half-hour for the field to become playable again. The Flyers, DiNardo said, used to have shutters over their lights, and the shutters would open and close to create darkness, but someone once hit the wrong switch, and a game was delayed 20 minutes.

Today’s lights can turn on and off at a moment’s notice. They can change colors. They can pulse. They can flash in specific shapes and patterns — the Phillies’ light towers shine in a K after a strikeout — and they can be programmed to almost dance to the rhythm of a specific song.

And that song — along with any accompanying sound effects — will sound much louder and clearer on modern speaker systems, while LED ribbon boards show essentially high-definition video that can be programmed and coordinated to build a digital scene throughout a ballpark. The Phillies employ a specialist who works with all their lighting products to design elaborate shows that can be activated with the push of a button.

“The technology has just completely altered the landscape of what’s going on,” DiNardo said.

The Phillies have a generic entrance for any reliever who enters into a save situation, and it’s a fairly elaborate show, but the Phillies don’t want to give every reliever an individualized, Duran-level treatment. They want his entrance to be special. They want fans to anticipate it. Duran is one of the great closers in the sport, and his entrance reflects that.

DiNardo was with the Phillies in 2008 when their closer, Brad Lidge, had one of the great relief seasons of all time. Lidge was an All-Star who finished eighth in MVP voting, and the Phillies did their best to give him the superstar treatment by cranking up “Soldiers” by the band Drowning Pool, showing a highlight video, and making Lidge’s name flash in two tones on the black-and-white scoreboard.

“That was the big show,” DiNardo said. “And that was in 2008, not that long ago!”

Rivera jogged out of the Yankee Stadium bullpen to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica and Hoffman closed games for the Padres to “Hells Bells” by AC/DC — Hendriks says those two songs should be retired like jersey numbers, unavailable to all relievers in today’s game — but Rivera and Hoffman didn’t play in stadiums capable of much more than a rock song and a screaming crowd. Hoffman finally got the full-stadium experience this summer when he pitched in a Savannah Bananas exhibition game and entered to flames on the ribbon boards and cell phone lights in the stands. It was a triumphant return and a shared experience. The shining phones were a part of the show.

That’s how far reliever entrances have spread. It’s not just the millions of dollars invested in stadium lights and speakers. It’s the hundreds of dollars spent on smartphones that can fill ballparks with tiny glowing lights. At Phillies games, fans can connect to an app so that their phones pulse in time with Duran’s music as he enters the game.

That wasn’t possible — on several levels — when Rivera closed out the World Series 25 years ago, but if the Phillies advance to the Fall Classic this month, or even if they have a narrow lead in the ninth inning of a game this weekend, Citizens Bank Park will become an interactive movie set, inside of a digital amusement park, all because one man is about to try for three outs in a baseball game.

“The more we can use technology to interact with the fans to bring them into what’s going on in the ballpark and the field, the better it is for the game and for the sport and for our fans,” DiNardo said. “It should be part of the show, and they should come in and expect something that they haven’t seen before that will really electrify them.”

When the end of the game looks like the end of the world, it’s just getting to the good part.

With reports from The Athletic’s Charlotte Varnes

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Top photos: Eric Hartline/Imagn Images, Dustin Satloff/Getty Images, Al Bello//Getty Images)