Twenty thousand seasons were played out overnight, and the machine that played them came back with a shrug. Not one of the eight managers in this league finished better than a 62 percent shot at the playoffs. Not one finished worse than 35 percent. In a sport that sells certainty by the column inch, the Examiner is obliged to report that there isn't any.

This is the eighteenth season of a league that began in 2009, and it opens with the narrowest projected field in memory. Tommy grades out on top at 61.5 percent, which sounds like a lot until you notice that Mau, dead last, still makes the postseason better than one season in three. Between them sit six managers separated by less than a single projected win.

The reason is arithmetic, not modesty. The auction on September 4 distributed talent almost perfectly evenly: the highest-projected starting lineup in the league scores 141.4 points a week, the lowest 132.5. That gap of nine points sits inside a weekly scoring swing of roughly twenty-nine. The draft, in other words, was a good one, and good drafts make bad predictions.