Degrees of desperation among playoff teams

For the last, oh, century or so, there have been two baseball curses that mattered. There was the Red Sox thing, of course — 86 years of concentrated heartbreak, Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner and the rest. Then, there was the Cubs’ Billy Goat thing — 70 seasons without a pennant, more than 100 without a World Series championship. You know these stories well.