Tex is gone; trade was a bust

Now that Mark Teixeira is no longer an Atlanta Brave, we can look back on the trade that had the Braves packaging 5 players to Texas for Teixeira and Ron Mahay. Boy was that a bust. I don’t know if Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Matt Harrison, Elvis Andrus, Beau Jones or Neftali will ever amount to anything in Texas, but we can be certain that Big Tex failed to deliver a single division title during his run here. He was acquired in a move that had Braves fans thinking division title, but it didn’t happen. Then the following season, despite having decent numbers in a box score, he never seemed to step up in clutch situations. It seems he was always rolling over a grounder to the right side of the infield when the team needed a two-out hit with runners on base.
Now GM Frank Wren has decided that a combination of 25 year old Casey Kotchman, Teixeira’s replacement at first through the 2011 season and Class AA reliever Stephen Marek, was better than the two first round picks the team would have received at the end of the year. Kotchman, the center of this deal for Atlanta, is hitting .287 this season with 12 homers and 54 RBIs, certainly not Tex numbers, but he is only 25, and he is making 1.45M, opposed to Tex’s 12.8M. As for Marek, he is a reliever that sports a 2-6 record with a 3.66 ERA and has 57 Ks in 46.2 IP. He is a throw-in here and Braves fans should be disappointed to know that last season the Angels offered Texas Joe Saunders and Kotchman, which was a much better deal and you should consider that they would have been dealing inside their own division.
Bottom line, the Teixeira era is over in Atlanta, and it has left probably 95% of Braves fans unsatisfied and probably more will be as disappointed with the trade, considering if this deal had been done two weeks ago, the squad maybe could have gotten more from the Red Sox or Arizona. But, let the Casey Kotchman era begin in Atlanta. His arrival is likely the first step of a major overhaul to this organization that will look drastically different come April.