With the season's opening games less than two weeks away, it's time to take a quick tour -- two by two this year -- through some of the best teams out there.

No. 13 Georgia

The good news is Georgia returns almost everyone from a juggernaut offensive team that reached the Women's College World Series and fought its way to within a game of the final series. The bad news is all those returning sluggers will be attempting to duplicate the trip along a little used and potentially difficult route to Oklahoma City. Going back to 2004, 48 teams have appeared in the World Series. Only two of those teams did so with worse team ERAs than Georgia last season -- it just so happens that both Arizona and Arizona State did it last season (your eyes didn't deceive; offense really did rule in 2009). Here are the 10 highest team ERAs among World Series qualifiers between 2004 and 2009. (Only Arizona won a championship among those teams, although as an entirely tangential but nevertheless interesting aside, the team with the best ERA among World Series qualifiers failed to win in each of the past six tournaments). And of the two essential players Georgia lost to graduation, one of them was the team's most effective pitcher, Christie Hamilton. There are three new pitchers listed on the roster at the moment, and while plenty of aces have emerged from modest recruiting backgrounds, there's not necessarily an obvious No. 1 among successful junior-college transfers Katie Murphy and Alanna Hadley and freshman Alison Owen, or returnees Sarah McCloud, Erin Arevalo or All-American outfielder and occasional pitcher Taylor Schlopy. So will the offensive dominance that carried Georgia and others to the World Series despite limited pitching prove to be an aberration or a trend? Given how much of the team's offense returns intact, led by Schlopy (1.369 OPS, 47 RBIs) and third baseman Alisa Goler (1.547 OPS, 84 RBIs), the Bulldogs should be a prime test case.

No. 14 Missouri

The story of how Missouri coach Ehren Earleywine discovered Chelsea Thomas was something right out of a W.P. Kinsella novel as it made the rounds on the eve of last year's World Series. A blurry recruiting video that's most distinctive feature was the sound of the ball smacking into the catcher's mitt sent Earleywine driving the back roads of Iowa -- to Pleasantville, no less -- in search of the hidden treasure. He found it, all right, and Thomas is a big reason why the Tigers have a chance to be more than a one-and-done World Series participant (Texas is the only Big 12 team to make back-to-back trips since 2004, courtesy of the tall lefty now coaching at DePaul, Cat someone-or-other). As a freshman, Thomas went 16-7 with a 1.65 ERA, impressive enough, but only scratching the surface if you go by how she looked in some of her postseason appearances. But more than a good story, the tale of how she ended up at Missouri is instructive of how Earleywine has built this team. Manage your own talent pool as best you can and let other people worry about their own backyards. Almost every player on Missouri's roster -- 17 of 22 -- hails from Missouri or neighboring areas in Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. The only other sizable contingent is from Georgia, an area Earleywine certainly knows well from his time as Georgia Tech's coach. And it's a newcomer in that latter group who could be the sleeper of the spring in the Big 12. A transfer from Georgia State, Catherine Lee tore up the Colonial Athletic Association for two years. She led the league in her rookie campaign with 17 home runs and an .810 slugging percentage, and far from falling into a sophomore slump last season, she showed enough patience to lead the league in on-base percentage while still slugging better than .500. Not many coaches anywhere know hitting better than Earleywine, so put Lee's talent together with his tutelage and the results should be fun to watch.

Graham Hays covers softball for ESPN.com. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.