Once upon a time there was a baseball team.
It had been a very long time since they had won a World Series, and though they had made a number of postseason appearances since, they’d always fallen short of the ultimate prize.
They had a number of homegrown stars who eventually did help them win that elusive World Series title, but over time, the team grew stale and many of those stars stopped producing and left the team.
They went into the regular season as an afterthought, a team with a number of question marks, particularly in the pitching staff.