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 was 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. Some level of classic Metsian farce ensues, and the whole endeavor falls apart, following the example of the rotation.
It was not that this kind of downfall was expected. Indeed, something like the opposite felt closer to the truth: The Mets had more reason for optimism this spring than had been the case for them in years. (That deGrom and Scherzer were on a roster together in the first place was proof positive of that!) It was just that if there were going to be some bumps in the road—well, it wasn’t hard to guess what they were most likely to be. There was widespread recognition that deGrom and Scherzer could easily be the best one-two punch in baseball if healthy. There was also widespread recognition that the most important part of that sentence, by far, was “if healthy.” Mets fans could reasonably harbor big dreams for this season, but they could also harbor one very painful, specific nightmare.
