Soriano was the ace of the Rattler starting rotation in 2000. That starting rotation was Soriano, JJ Putz, Matt Thornton, Craig Anderson, and Cha-Seung Baek. Soriano went 8-4 with a 2.87 ERA in 21 starts that season.
Here is the reaction from Talking Chop. This one is from before the trade became official.
I would rate this as a VERY GOOD trade for the Braves. We pick up a critical reliever who we will control for two more years before he becomes a free agent, and we traded from a position of strength - left-handed starting pitching. Honestly, I feel we got the better end of this deal. With the prices for even marginal relievers skyrocketing, we secured one of the best in the game for a pitcher who has yet to prove he's anything other than a back of the rotation injury-prone starter. I have a feeling that the Braves are not done tonight. There's a lot of talk about the LaRoche-Gonzalez deal with Pittsburgh as being all but done pending physicals. The Braves may also be trying to leverage the Pirates against the Angels to get more in return.
This one is titled It's Official!
Mariner fans begin your weeping, Braves fans being your cheering. The deal was officially announced just before noon today, Rafael Soriano to the Braves for Horacio Ramirez. This is truly another coup pulled off by John Schuerholz and company. In Soriano we get a guy with the stuff of Kyle Farnsworth and the confidence of Mariano Rivera; a huge upgrade to our bullpen while giving up someone who was completely expendable to the rotation.
Now for the counter-point, again I bring you Lookout Landing. First before the deal was official, a post called Breathe.
Moving on, while nothing's been announced officially yet, I've become resigned to the fact that Raffy Soriano really is being swapped for Horacio Ramirez. To believe otherwise is something of an illegitimate pipe dream, and the chances that it doesn't go down are roughly equivalent to those of a bunch of physicists waking up tomorrow and saying "just kidding about gravity." You'd be relying on an awful lot of people being wrong, and given how widespread the story has gotten over the past few hours, that just doesn't make very much sense.
The trade sucked when I heard about it, it sucks now, and it'll suck for the next several seasons. To make things worse, it seemed like after the initial report there was a glimmer of hope that it wasn't true, but then that fantasy came crashing down as well. I've always argued that the easiest way to make somebody happy is to take away something they care about and then give it back. With that in mind, rumors that the deal wasn't legitimate after all sent each of us into a euphoric tizzy. But here's the problem - if you take that precious thing away again, it hurts even more than the first time. So now I'm even more upset than I was six hours ago. This blows.
I want to make one thing clear - although the trade is egregiously lopsided, that's not necessarily what I'm even the most angry about. My biggest issue is that Horacio Ramirez does absolutely nothing that John Thomson couldn't do. Yeah, okay, he throws with the other hand, but at the end of the day you're talking about an ERA in the mid-4's over 180 innings provided the guy stays healthy. And while Ramirez'll stick around an extra year or three, Thomson's track record suggests considerably more upside, and there are guys like him available every winter anyway so it's not like Ramirez's contract status gives him a big advantage. Rather than pay $4m for an established free agent #4 starter, Bill Bavasi decided to give up Rafael Soriano instead. That is a colossal waste of what was easily our most valuable and tradeable asset.
Now here is one from after it became official:
I really need to move on from all this, but I'm having trouble. The Mariners just mangled so many parts of this trade that it's almost impossible to believe it actually happened. Alas, now we have Horacio Ramirez, and at least he looks like he can be okay. Soriano, meanwhile, is excited to be going to Atlanta, and he's dying to become a starter as soon as possible so he can shove it up the Mariners' patoot. He's going to miss his friends in Seattle, Rafael Chaves in particular, but he's frustrated that they didn't give him another chance in the rotation and he's eager to show that he's a better pitcher than the guy they got in return. Of course, as far as I'm concerned, he already has.
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