This is not an Insider article, so I will post the whole thing here...

This is Keith Law's take on the Soriano trade.

"Rafael Soriano was one of the two best relievers on the market, with former teammate Mike Gonzalez, and the Rays are fortunate to get someone of his caliber on a one-year deal for the price of a cheap middle reliever.

The Rays' pen, a strength of the 2008 pennant-winning club, was a major weakness in 2009, and Soriano helps them in almost any role as someone who throws strikes and misses bats; last year, nobody in Tampa's pen came close to Soriano's ability to do both of those things, and his arrival allows Joe Maddon to shift J.P. Howell to work in the seventh and eighth innings depending on matchups.

You will still hear whispers about Soriano being less than tough, especially when he blows his first save, but he didn't show any propensity to melt down in 2009 in a full year of closing. The trade is worth a couple of wins on paper -- maybe more if Soriano's used in a highly-leveraged way -- and with Soriano likely to make somewhere between $7 million and $7.5 million in arbitration, he should be a good value.

Jesse Chavez -- Atlanta's addition -- is a three-pitch reliever with an above-average fastball and a solid-average changeup; he has shown plus control throughout his pro career, making him a good bet to be an average middle guy, although he doesn't miss enough bats to be a late-game reliever. I'm a little surprised this was the best offer Atlanta could get for Soriano, but they also seemed desperate to move him immediately rather than wait out the winter and run the risk that they couldn't trade him.

The lesson here for clubs wavering on offering arbitration to a Type A free agent is that having the player accept against your wishes is not the end of the world. If the player is good and his market was hurt by the Type A designation, you should still be able to dump the salary, at the least, if not actually trade him for something of value. Atlanta's decision to offer might not look like the right one because Soriano accepted, but it was the right call, and I'd rather take the risk of having a good player accept than throw away the chance for two high draft picks the way Dodgers did by not offering a deal to Randy Wolf. "