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Ray Knight still follows the Mets as much as possible, and the 1986 World Series MVP is happy they’ve turned around their season and are challenging for a playoff position.
“Always follow the Mets. Just happy that they’ve begun to play good baseball, solid baseball,” Knight said Saturday at Fanatics Fest NYC at Javits Center. “Early in the year, it seemed like everything was a struggle.
“But they’ve [started] to score runs, are getting better pitching, and hey, they got a chance to maybe do some damage. You get in the playoffs, you never know what’s going to happen.”
The Mets were going nowhere at 24-35 in early June, but they are now just one game behind the Braves for the third wild-card position in the National League under first-year manager Carlos Mendoza.
The 71-year-old Knight, who played three seasons for the Mets from 1984-86, believes those early struggles helped the team develop chemistry and resiliency.
“When you go through adversity and come out of it, there’s always that,” Knight said. “You learn to cope and deal with down days, down weeks, but then when you come out of that, you realize, ‘hey, we are pretty good.’ So you have that value of not having to worry or think that this struggle is going to be an absolute struggle. We’re going to come out of here and play good baseball.”
The retired third baseman was acquired from the Astros after the Mets had finished 68-94 in 1983.
They improved by 22 games the following season before winning 98 games in 1985 and then a franchise-record 108 in 1986 en route to the World Series title over the Red Sox.
“In ’84, I got traded over there, and they were already really good,” Knight said. “It was just a matter [of] getting that pitching staff ironed out. Doc [Gooden] came along and, obviously, [Ron] Darling and [making] the trade for [Bobby] Ojeda. … The pitching staff — there was a lot of offense there already — and once that pitching staff established itself, it was just a feeling like you could win every day.”
