Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning during the regular season you’ll get a fresh, topical story to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
If you had been asked in March to sketch out a hypothetical downfall for the 2022 Mets—asked to guess, if this season were to go badly, what path it would take to get there—a practical answer might have gone something like this. Jacob deGrom cannot bounce back from the health issues that sidelined him in ’21. Due to injury, age or a maddening combination of the two, struggles lie in wait for Max Scherzer.