NUMBER NINE....NUMB ER NINE....NUMBER NINE

CyYoung31 said:
I mean, JS destroyed our farm system, but we built it up again by mid-2009 with some pretty good present-day major leaguers.

Heyward, Freeman, Teheran, Vizcaino, Gattis, Schafer, Morton, Locke, Kimbrel, Venters, Simmons, Minor, Medlen, Hanson just off the top of my head.
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True, but the best of this bunch were acquired before the Tex trade. Only Vizcaino, Gattis, Kimbrel, Simmons, and Minor were acquired after that trade. And Gattis was a stroke of luck. And the fact that Venters, Morton, and Locke are considered big pieces of our farm system at the time kind of makes my point for me.

The bottom line is that after this trade, our entire approach to the farm changed. I don't care who gets the blame, but it's a fact. We stopped bringing in high-ceiling talents after this trade, and by 2014 we saw the results of that approach. And it wasn't good. Even guys like Simmons and Minor - while good - were the absolute best this strategy was ever going to produce. And a rotation full of Minors with a lineup full of Simmons' won't win anything meaningful.
 
smootness said:
This. Wren doesn't get let off the hook here. While there's no way our return for Tex would have matched what we gave up, we absolutely could have gotten some serious talent, but instead we decided we had to have a major-league 1B in return for some dumb reason, and we ended up with Casey freaking Kotchman.
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But was that Bobby or Wren? I always thought that Bobby and former Twins' manager Tom Kelly were cut out of the same bolt of cloth (and they aren't alone). Some guys just stress the "play the right way" thing to the enth degree and they seem to have this love for guys like Kotchman who are fundamentally sound and "do the little things." Cox did a much better job than Kelly of incorporating younger players into the flow of things, but every now and then he would seem to throw a tiff about having a Kotchman-type playing a much larger role than necessary. Maybe in Bobby's case it came from watching David Justice attempt to play 1B for half a season until Dale Murphy was traded. It's also important to remember that the Braves did sign Sid Bream who was on his last legs as a major leaguer because he could catch the ball.

PS--If the current draft bonus rules had been in effect, my guess is the Braves would have held on to Teixeira and let him walk after the season and reap the draft pick. Back then, ownership (and the front office by extension) probably didn't think they had enough dough in the budget to draft and sign a legitimate draft prospect at #25. Braves didn't have a 2nd round pick and signed their 3rd-rounder--David Hale--for $405,000.
 
Could have used another starter that year and I can't believe we couldn't have convinced them to add Kevin Millwood to the deal. He wasn't great that year, but still would have been a better option than Carlyle/Davies/Reyes.

Of course, all of this is moot if the Braves hold to to LaRoche instead of dealing him for a reliever
 
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