A look ahead after the trade deadline and Cardinals fire sale. What’s next for the team?

A press availability for John Mozeliak after the passage of the trade deadline is nothing new.

In his decade and a half of running baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals, he’s been obliged just as many times to explain the team’s moves to the assembled media, outlining a vision for competition that highlights the players added more than the players shipped out.

In recent years, the team has been roundly criticized for its lack of movement at this crucial time of year. All told, it’s likely Mozeliak would’ve preferred that sort of discussion to the one he was obligated to have on Tuesday evening.

Over the last three days, the Cardinals traded away four pitchers (Jack Flaherty, Jordan Hicks, Jordan Montgomery and Chris Stratton) who were set to be free agents at the end of the season, as well as shortstop Paul DeJong, on whom the team held a club option. It was an unequivocal fire sale of the sort that almost no one would have predicted at the season’s open.

“We feel like we gave ourselves a chance to really add to our bench, if you will, and to give us a lot of options moving forward, and something that we don’t have to wait four or five years to see a return on,” Mozeliak said. “So, net net, we’re excited about it, but we still have to be patient, get them in our system and see really where we’re at.”

Including the trade of Génesis Cabrera to Toronto on July 21, the Cardinals acquired ten total players at the deadline, seven of whom are pitchers. Only two – lefty reliever John King and lefty starter Drew Rom – are sufficiently advanced in their careers to be part of the 40-player roster. King is the only new addition who joined the Major League team’s active roster.

Triple-A Memphis received a bounty, including three new pitchers for its 2023 rotation – Rom, and righties Sem Robberse and Adam Kloffenstein, both acquired from Toronto. That organizational depth is important. It does not represent a guarantee for 2024, and a big league team that now needs to lock in, at minimum, three starting pitchers to accompany Steven Matz and Miles Mikolas.

“Next year’s roster is going to look different,” Mozeliak said. “We know that we weren’t at the competitive level we wanted to be, and so change has to happen.”

“We’re going to have yeoman’s work to do to fill our rotation,” he added. “We didn’t want to make that even more difficult.”

The rest of this season will be spent, in part, evaluating the internal options for those spots. Matt Liberatore, who has made eight starts in the majors in 2023, will be given the rest of the year on regular turns with regular rest to demonstrate his effectiveness.

None of those eight starts have come on a typical four days of rest. Results from Liberatore have been poor, but they’ve also been out of rhythm. By removing that excuse and improving the context around him, the Cardinals hope to separate signal from noise.

Dakota Hudson will be granted a similar opportunity. JoJo Romero will have opportunities to close games. Mozeliak said the team would consider returning to three catchers to create space for Iván Herrera, and named slugger Luken Baker as a player deserving of more immediate shots.

The last remaining major variable is Masyn Winn. Now the team’s top prospect after Jordan Walker’s graduation from the rankings, twice this week Mozeliak has conceded the strong possibility of his making his Major League debut in 2023. Despite the trade of DeJong and season ending arm surgery for Brendan Donovan, Winn hasn’t yet arrived, and José Fermín was promoted to a spot on the bench.

That, in part, comes from cold calculus – if Winn spends less than 45 days on the active roster and tallies less than 130 at bats this season, he maintains eligibility as a rookie for next season, and the Cardinals would receive an awarded draft pick if he were to win Rookie of the Year.

If Winn arrives in the third week of August, the Cardinals should clear those barriers. And given that winning, no matter their protestations, is no longer the primary goal of this season, there’s not much downside to handling that promotion as cynically as possible in the coming weeks.

That cynicism will have to be balanced with the optimism that comes with an on-the-fly retooling. The Cardinals reiterated Tuesday that they intend to compete in 2024, and their expectation is that at least a few of the prospects acquired over the weekend might contribute to that competition.

They will have the next two months to find out. Everything else happening on the field is secondary.

“We still want to come to the ballpark every day,” Mozeliak said. “We still want to put an entertaining product out there, and we still hope to win some baseball games. From a front office standpoint, yeah, it’s going to weigh heavily on how people perform and what we see. And that’ll determine how we really put our offseason strategy together.”

This story was originally published August 2, 2023 at 7:07 AM.