Hey everyone, one quick note before we begin. Sam is traveling today, so we recorded before Ken

Rosenthal reported that Kopey Rasmus would accept the Astros qualifying offer. In 17 minutes or so,

you'll hear how well that worked out for me. So sit back, relax, and listen to both of us be

wrong about baseball.

Good morning and welcome to episode 766 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from baseball

perspective presented by the play index of baseballreference.com. I'm Ben Lindbergh of ESPN,

joined as always by Sam Miller of baseball perspective. Hello. Hello.

enthusiastic hello. Happy to be here, as always. I'm ready. Serious business. Yeah, this is a

serious episode. It feels like there are some stakes to this one. This is one that we've been

looking forward to. I guess we can call it an annual tradition in that it is the second time

that we've done this. It's the Jim Bowden annual free agent predictions draft, the over-under

draft. Is there anything you want to say before we start? No. Okay. So every year for the past five

years, I guess this is the fifth year he's done it. Jim Bowden has predicted free agent contracts

and destinations. Early on in his predicting, he developed a reputation for being really,

really good at this. I have no idea whether that reputation is still justified. It does sort of

feel like the secret sauce. Yeah, right. It's over-secret sauce. We're seven years from now. We'll

quietly withdraw. Yeah. So I am not going to pretend that Jim Bowden is the

savant of predicting free agent prices. He was for one or maybe two off seasons. And I don't

think anyone has looked into it since. I'm going to guess he's not the best at this by any

significant margin. So we could do this with any of the other major media people who predict

free agent prices. We could, but he did earn this. I don't know if John Axford is any better at

picking Oscar winners either. Yeah. But he earned the reputation. That's the keeping. What

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