Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated
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.
NEW YORK — As Anthony Rizzo’s free agency stretched into its fifth month, he realized two things: After a disappointing 2020 and ’21, “the deal that I once envisioned wasn’t gonna be there,” he says. And if he couldn’t get five years, he didn’t want three. He wanted one.