On the point of owners being richer than players, consider the fans. The escalating salaries translate into the escalating ticket prices, especially in the larger markets. Look at what the NFL has achieved in terms of competitive balance with their salary cap.

The only prospects we traded, who turned out to be stud is Adam Wainwright.  Other than that no one on that list has done any thing of importance for their respective teams.  Although people like Neftali has a ton of talent but how many time we have seen prospects with all the talent in the world fail.

Your play and field estimates would work fine in the olden days when the starting pitchers pitched the whole game.  In Hudson’s case that might not work out so well.  The reason being, Hudson has been pitching like a cy-young winner for the past 3 years.  If it wasnt for Dan Kolb and other crappy closer/set-up guys he might have won 20 games the past 2 seasons. 

JD and Sheffield had one good season and since then has seen a decline in their numbers (JD rebounded a little this season).  I believe that the Braves made the right moves in situations involving JD and Sheffield but not with Tex.  I believe they over-paid for him but that is because JS wanted to win the championship in his last season as the GM and sold the farm.

To quickly comment on one thing in it, one of the reasons fans sympathize with the owners, when if anything they should rationally sympathize with the players, is that the players have been such complete jerks about the whole negotiation process.  To have heard Tom Glavine speak some years ago, you’d have thought the players were risking death every day in coal mines. 

My number one complaint about the Braves for years has been that they are just delusional about the state of the team.  When the team was good enough to make the playoffs but not to actually advance past the first round, they thought they had a potential World Series winner.  All of those teams were deeply flawed, some with pitching, some with hitting, but all failed to even get back to the World Series.  And the 1999 team that was the last to go was a far cry from those vastly superior teams that went 4 times earlier in the decade.

Schuerholz is partly to blame for this “rent-a-player” trend.  I’ve heard it said that “Crazy is when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result”.   Schuerholz even admitted his relationship with Boras was very bad.  I think things just went south with Boras after Schuerholz thought he had reached a deal to sign A Rod and A Rod delayed signing the contract and then got the much better offer from Texas.  I think Schuerholz felt like he’d been played and it was really just the end of any kind of normal business relationship between them.  I also think that getting Chipper and Andruw to sign and give hometown discounts to the Braves made Schuerholz believe that all players would feel that way.  I think JC is right that when guys are young and have less money, they are more willing to sign those kinds of deals and I am too lazy to check, but I suspect that this would apply to both Chipper and Andruw at the time of the signing.

In the case of Sheffield, he needed to go after his contract was up. He flopped terribly in the post season, seemingly hitting with runners on base constantly and not getting them in.

Drew had a good year, but is a smart southern boy who knows that baseball is about the $$, and has maximized his return.  Getting only a year of Drew for Wainwright can be seen as a loss in hindsight.

The Texiera trade was a reach, and may turn out to be a bad one. He did perform well last year, and they are trying to win one more before Cox retires. It was a gamble, but it had two years to pay off, and didn’t.

Cruz has been a solid reliever, and Meyer may be good, but the Braves didn’t give up a lot for Hudson. He has been solid in the rotation, until the recent injury.
To this point, the Braves haven’t given up any Scott Kazmir types for absolute busts, so they can’t be faulted too much.

When the Braves make deals like this, I view it as a rental of the player for a year or two and a chance to sign them long-term.  I don’t think the success of the deal ever hinges on signing them long-term.   The Braves have one of the most productive farm systems in baseball and can take advantage of that in two ways by developing young stars as well as trading them for more experienced players.  Those players may not be around for more than a year or two but as long as they make a major impact while they are here, and all of these players did, I view the trade as an overall success in spite of our failure to sign the player received to a long-term deal.