Good morning and welcome to episode 377 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from Baseball

perspective. I'm Ben Lindbergh, joined by Sam Miller. How are you? Good, the same. How are you?

Pretty well. Good. Talk about the Super Bowl. Boy, how about those big plays? I didn't see any of them.

Oh man, all up and down the field, they were big plays. Yeah, sorry I missed them.

It's my day. It is. Before we start, people have been Facebook asking and email asking about the

season preview shows. We are planning to start them this week and we will be doing sort of the same

format as last year. You and I will be interviewing someone who wrote for the annual, either the essay

or the chapter comments for the team in question and then our intern Nick at BP will be interviewing

someone else, someone from outside of BP, a beat writer or columnist or a broadcaster who covers

that team and we will put the interviews together and hopefully you will enjoy both perspectives.

So we'll be going in order of projected win totals this year. So we'll be starting with the

Astros going bottom to top later this week. Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, spoiler alert, Ben, spoiler alert,

spoilers, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. You're right, you're right. No one knew that the Astros would have been

projected to be bad. Sorry, sorry for blowing it. When are we starting that? I think we're starting

at Wednesday. If it all comes together. Drat, I thought we were starting it tomorrow and so my

topic is slightly, slightly an anticipation of that, but not entirely. But before we get to that,

can I just ask you now that AJ Burnett is taking offers? I mean, we don't know what AJ Burnett

actually told the pirates that the explanation for why the pirates didn't make him a qualifying

offer was largely at least reported as being that, you know, Burnett basically told them that he

was going to retire or sign with them. And so there was really no point in them offering

him a qualifying offer. And I don't know, maybe it would have seemed tacky if they had

or something like that. And so do you, I don't know, how do you feel about that? Are you suggesting

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