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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > July > 29
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Teixeira trade makes room for more improving
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It wasn’t just they made a move. It’s that they made the right move. They found a first baseman for 2009 and beyond, and when you consider what next spring might have brought — “Starting at first base for your Atlanta Braves, Scott Thorman!” — Casey Kotchman looks like Mark Grace.
“Our infield now has a very solid nucleus,” Frank Wren said Tuesday. “We need to look for another big bat … [And] we’ve got to work on our pitching.”
Yes, those are major concerns. But letting Mark Teixeira walk away with draft picks as compensation would have matched the Hawks’ botch of the Josh Childress negotiations as the worst maneuver of the summer. At least now the Braves have a first baseman. At least now they can move on to the next tasks.
Truth to tell, they needed the head start. This season was designed as a last stand — nobody in the organization has admitted as much, but some truths are self-evident — and it flopped so badly as to attach a massive question mark to everything going forward.
John Smoltz might never pitch again. Tom Glavine might well retire. Tim Hudson might need surgery. Mike Hampton, suddenly the most robust member of the over-30 gang, will become a free agent. And if, as late as Tuesday afternoon you were eyeballing the projected everyday eight for 2009, you saw only two big-timers (Chipper Jones, who’ll turn 37 in April, and Brian McCann) and one up-and-comer (Yunel Escobar). Everything else seemed a varying shade of ordinary.
Kotchman changes the dynamic. He’s not the run-producer Teixeira was, but he beats the heck out of Thorman. Sellers for the first time since 1990, the Braves had to broker their biggest asset into something nearly as big, and they did. “We would have made the trade without [getting] a first baseman,” Wren said, “but this made the Anaheim deal very attractive.”
Now for the bad news: The Braves have no more Teixeiras to peddle. Will Ohman might net a prospect, but nothing more. If they sought to move Jeff Francoeur today, they’d get pennies on the dollar. And they still need hitting, still need outfielders, still need starting pitchers.
Wren spoke of finding a center fielder “from within” the organization, but starting pitchers and run-producers will come only from without. (Charlie Morton, this year’s bright young hope, has yielded 66 hits and walks against only 24 strikeouts in 39-2/3 innings.) And that means the Braves will have to swing more deals, which might be possible if they had something to offer, or buy a big-ticket free agent, which they haven’t done since signing Brian Jordan in 1998.
“We choose to put our club together differently, using scouting and player development,” Wren said. “That’s not to say we’ve been opposed to adding key pieces [via free agency]. We won’t shy away from that — it just hasn’t been our priority or our preference.”
That needs to change. So long as the Braves were winning the division, they could afford to eschew the overspending inherent in free agency. But they’ve finished third the past two seasons, and they’re in fourth place now, and the time is gone when the answer to every ill was to bring back Julio Franco.
Kotchman is a good player, and he’ll help. But gazing at 2009 from the distant perch of July 2008, next season doesn’t figure to look much better than this one. For the first time in almost a generation, the Braves just aren’t talented enough to win. They have to find better players. They have to find them soon.
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