In less-than-perfect trade market, St. Louis Cardinals make less-than-perfect deals
The St. Louis Cardinals spent the last five years largely avoiding adding players at the trade deadline. They attempted to correct that decision on Friday by acquiring two pitchers whose careers peaked nearly five years ago.
Following Jack Flaherty’s oblique strain and Miles Mikolas’s setback in his recovery from flexor surgery, the Cardinals used two months to explore various methods of keeping their pitching afloat throughout an unforgiving summer.
They have indeed been active in cycling through waiver wire flotsam, and continued that trend on Friday by trading John Gant and minor league reliever Evan Fisk to Minnesota for 38-year-old lefty JA Happ.
The Washington Nationals exchanged 37-year-old lefty starter Jon Lester for outfielder Lane Thomas to wrap up the club’s deadline work.
“I think we really went into this looking for, trying to land some pitching that would give us some stability and some experience,” Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak said. “We also wanted to try to do it in a way that we wouldn’t be giving up a lot of future talent. And so that was something that was sort of critical in our decision making.”
Both Happ (5-6, 6.77 earned run average) and Lester (3-5, 5.02) will move into the Cardinals’ rotation, whose youngest member is now 33-year-old Kwang Hyun Kim.
Flaherty and Mikolas are both well on their way to a mid-August return to the rotation, and the Cardinals will now seek to tread water in the standings until they can be buoyed by the return of two pitchers who, in the off-season, the club was counting on to be stalwarts of their staff.
The Cardinals entered play on Friday in third place in the National League Central, 9 1/2 games behind the Milwaukee Brewers. They were 7 1/2 behind the San Diego Padres for the second Wild Card.
Despite the club’s summer struggles, a defiant Mozeliak expressed a belief that he was “not sure it would have mattered” if the Cardinals had moved more aggressively to set the trade market ahead of a deadline at which prices seemed to be consistently high.
“You get the highest return by waiting the longest,” Mozeliak said, “because then you create a market. You ultimately saw over the last couple days what people had to pay for premium talent.”
The Cardinals, Mozeliak said, were not interested in including any of their top five prospects in trades. That group includes, at a minimum, pitcher Matthew Liberatore and infielders Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker.
Part of the concern for the Cardinals as they approached the deadline was the exposure faced by rookie righthander Johan Oviedo, who remains winless in 18 career big league starts. Oviedo was groomed in spring training for spot starts, duty that would have allowed him to develop at Triple-A Memphis under considerably less pressure than the 23-year-old faced in the crucible for a team seeking to contend for a World Series title.
Oviedo has made a total of three starts at Triple-A. He has 23 starts at Double-A, none since 2019.
“When you look at putting a major league team on the field, sometimes it’s nice to know you’re running someone out there that’s been there and done that,” Mozeliak said.
Multiple sources indicated that the Cardinals in recent days remained in communication with the Colorado Rockies about pending free agent shortstop Trevor Story, who the club ultimately did not trade.
Mozeliak acknowledged that the Cardinals entered Friday expecting to consummate at least one trade that did not come to fruition, though he denied that that deal referred to Story specifically.
“There [were] some things that we looked at from the position player side, but I would not characterize anything as really close on that end,” Mozeliak said.
“It’s our responsibility — or my job, or my team’s job — to touch base with lots of teams and make sure we understand what the ask might be, or the cost might be, and then internally, we decide if we make sense or not.”
Clearly, for the Cardinals, the price for Story did not make sense. Nor did the necessary price to clear up their pitching problems earlier in the season cross the threshold to acceptable. That leaves the club protecting Oviedo and potentially upgrading marginally on Jake Woodford even as they trade away a pitcher in Gant who, despite his tightrope walking on the field and cantankerousness off the field, managed to generate results over his five seasons in St. Louis.
The Cardinals truly neither bought or sold, but will instead play out the string with hopes to catch fire before entering an offseason, which will see significant salary commitments fall from their books.
Whether that flexibility translates to financial muscle will depend on the read of the marketplace that comes from Mozeliak’s baseball operations group.
“Obviously, in a perfect world, the decisions you’re making in the offseason play out, you don’t have injuries and you get through the year,” Mozeliak mused.
The world is less than perfect.
