It’s a scary time to be a Chicago Cubs fan. Fresh off a surprise trip to the 2015 National League Championship Series and an off-season that created incredible depth, the Cubs were given 4/1 odds by Westgate SuperBook to win their first World Series since 1908 – a prediction that, if true, would end the longest championship drought in the history of American professional sports.

This is the first time the Cubs have appeared to be a legitimate championship contender since 2008, when they won the National League Central Division. The critical difference between then and now is that the 2008 team was built for short-term success, assembled primarily from free agent signings and trades for veterans near the end of their prime years. The window of opportunity was narrow, and there was a small comfort in that. Fans knew that success would be a pleasant aberration, and the Cubs would be back to their familiar losing ways in no time.

Brian Cassella | Chicago Tribune

Of course, the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the Cubs out of the National League Division Series in three games.

This time feels different. The post-2008 Cubs paid for their shortsightedness, regressing for several consecutive years with little hope for the future, until Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein became the team’s president of baseball operations in October 2011. One of the most respected executives in baseball, Epstein ended the Red Sox’s 86-year World Series drought—the third-longest in baseball history—in 2004, adding another title in 2007.

Epstein is part of a new generation of sports executives that has moved away from a historical tendency to overvalue gut instinct and fan-friendly statistics that do a poor job of explaining performance (runs and saves are prominent examples in baseball), instead using advanced statistics and probabilities to drive decisions.

Birthed by former Oakland Athletics general manager and current executive vice president Billy Beane, Epstein and fellow analytics-driven executives like Sam Hinkie of the Philadelphia 76ers and Stan Bowman of the Chicago Blackhawks approach athletic competitions as an economic problem, searching for the most efficient strategies and undervalued assets in their respective leagues.

Working with the Cubs’ general manager, Jed Hoyer, Epstein has assembled what is arguably the strongest and deepest pool of young talent in Major League Baseball, while making smart trades and free agent singings to fill the holes their homegrown talent can’t close.

When they arrived, the Cubs’ minor league system was ranked 16 (out of 32 teams) by Baseball America. By 2015, it was number one.

Epstein and Hoyer engineered this leap by ignoring tradition and trusting history. In many professional sports, the accepted logic holds that teams should use the draft to address current needs. If a football team has struggled to get pressure on opposing quarterbacks, many would suggest the team use its first-round pick on a pass rusher.

The Cubs do not think this way. Even though Chicago has developed some of the best hitting talent in the minor leagues, Epstein and Hoyer have yet to draft a pitcher in the first round. Prior to the 2015 season, the Cubs held seven of Baseball Prospectus’ top 100 prospects. Six were hitters.

This may seem like a narrow-minded approach. But viewed through the lens of history, it begins to make sense.

Pitchers are notoriously difficult to project into the future because they get injured at a higher rate than hitters. With pitchers being encouraged to throw faster and harder at earlier and earlier ages, even young pitchers with “fresh” arms are susceptible to injuries.

Since they are less injury prone, hitters are easier to predict. By focusing on hitters in the first round, Epstein and Hoyer minimize the risk of their most important selection, while retaining the ability to take high-risk pitchers with high upsides in the draft’s later rounds (there are up to 40 total). This strategy has worked so far, as two of Epstein and Hoyer’s four first round picks, Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber, were major contributors to last year’s team. Bryant was named the National League Rookie of the Year, and both posted positive WAR (wins above replacement, which measures the number of extra wins a player brings to a team compared to the average player that could be promoted from the minor leagues) ratings. Each is a cornerstone of the Cubs’ short-term and long-term plans.

While Chicago employs a hitter-centric draft strategy, they have been able to fill roster holes on the pitching side through a religious adherence to advanced statistics. Epstein and Hoyer shun traditional metrics such as ERA, which can unfairly punish a pitcher for poor defense. FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) is an analogous alternative which eliminates defense as a factor, only counting stats a pitcher can control: walks, strikeouts, hit-by-pitches and home runs.

The recent influx of advanced statistics has made it easier to more precisely measure a pitcher’s performance, but most teams do not value these statistics as highly as the Cubs do. Therefore, Epstein and Hoyer have been able to find undervalued pitchers in the trade and free agent markets, including Jake Arrieta, who won last year’s National League Cy Young award (given to the league’s best pitcher), Kyle Hendricks and Jason Hammel. All three pitchers posted one of the top 40 fielding-independent pitching ratings last year.

It took three years for Epstein and Hoyer’s work to pay off, but last year, after hiring one of the league’s best and most progressive managers (Joe Maddon), the team won 97 games, a 24-win improvement on the previous year, that brought the Cubs within four games of their first World Series appearance since 1945.

Heading into the off-season, four of the team’s five starting pitchers, four of the five relief pitchers who pitched the most innings last year and eight of the nine hitters who received the most plate appearances last year were under contract. Even if the Cubs didn’t re-sign any of the players whose contracts expired and made no major additions, they would be legitimate World Series contenders.

But Epstein and Hoyer did not rest. Instead, they engineered a brilliant series of acquisitions, leaving the team stronger in 2016 and beyond. (This is an extremely difficult thing to do. Off-season roster moves often force teams to choose between the present and the future. The Cubs, essentially, had their cake and ate it too.)

The first major move occurred on Dec. 8, when the team announced the signing of pitcher John Lackey away from the rival St. Louis Cardinals. Though he posted a 5.7 WAR last year (the fifth-best mark for a National League pitcher), Lackey will slot no higher than third in the Cubs’ rotation. Later that day, the team traded shortstop Starlin Castro to the New York Yankees for swingman pitcher Adam Warren and signed infielder Ben Zobrist to replace Castro. Known for his ability to play nearly any defensive position, Zobrist has produced a combined 11.8 WAR rating over the past four years, compared to Castro’s 5.7. Like Zobrist, Warren gives the team’s pitching staff additional flexibility, as he has the endurance and experience to work as either a starter or reliever. Over a 162-game season, injuries are bound to strike—Zobrist and Warren will soften those blows.

Lackey and Zobrist are short-term solutions who will provide valuable experience to a young roster that is ready to win now. But the centerpiece of the Cubs’ off-season acquisitions is 26-year-old outfielder Jason Heyward. The three-time Gold Glove winner (awarded to the best defensive player at each position) has finished in the top-10 in WAR for National League players each of the past two years, and is the rare free agent available in the early years of his prime. Heyward gives the Cubs an immediate and significant defensive upgrade who can factor into the team’s long-term plans. It doesn’t hurt that he, too, was signed away from the Cardinals.

So the Cubs will, most likely, be very good this year and for the foreseeable future. Considering that the franchise has made the playoffs in two consecutive years only once (2007 and 2008) since 1909, this is a big deal. It may also change the fundamental nature of Cubs fandom.

Being a Cubs fan is a strange, masochistic exercise. The team has the financial resources of a major market powerhouse, but often comes away with little to show for it. Assuming each team had identical odds of winning the World Series each year (which is not true, but for illustrative purposes, the stat will do), the odds of going 107 years without a championship are less than 0.5 percent. Yet the fans keep coming back, proudly supporting a franchise that, for much of its history, has been monumentally inept.

Cubs fandom is built around symbols: a curse inspired by a goat, Wrigley Field, Steve Bartman. Often, the games are beside the point. Losing is not an isolated experience; it is a way of life, an inside joke to be shared among the irrationally faithful. The Cubs lose because they are losers.

But what happens when the equation flips, when highly rational people use economic principles to maximize the probability of long-term success? There are no certainties in sports, but Epstein and Hoyer have increased the likelihood of sustained excellence to unprecedented levels. A fanbase that has embraced irrationality for over a century will have to come to terms with a team built in the most rational manner possible.

Of course, many fans will argue that the Cubs will find a way to screw it up, as they always do. Prior to last year’s sweep, the Cubs managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in their previous two NLCS appearances. In 1984, they squandered a two-game lead in a first-to-three series to the San Diego Padres. In 2003, they came within five outs of a World Series berth, only to collapse in the eighth inning of the sixth game. (They would lose the seventh.)

In all likelihood, the Cubs will not win the World Series this year. Yet the Cubs’ odds are among the best in the MLB and should continue to be for years to come. Combine these probabilities and the expected return on Epstein and Hoyer’s investments creeps closer to the ultimate payoff.

It’s a scary time to be a Cubs fan. The overpriced contracts, poorly managed farm systems and late season collapses may, for a time, become a thing of the past, replaced by the high stakes drama of rooting for a contender. The games are no longer beside the point. The history of futility may soon be.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect stylistic changes at the author’s request.