With GM meetings underway, how serious will the St. Louis Cardinals be in rebuilding?
Major League Baseball’s annual general managers meetings began on Monday in San Antonio, and as landmark dates begin to roll off the game’s offseason calendar, the St. Louis Cardinals are diving headlong into the task of first disassembling and then assembling a roster which will represent a cost savings in the team’s pursuit of what they believe to be a more sustainable, competitive model.
The baseball offseason is littered with dates which act as pressure points around those roster adjustments, and Monday at 4 p.m. Central is one of the largest. After that hour, free agents are eligible to sign with other teams, and decisions are due regarding the offering of qualifying offers to free agents.
The Cardinals, who declined team options on the contracts of Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn and Keynan Middleton, have six players hitting the open market. Matt Carpenter, Paul Goldschmidt and Andrew Kittredge joined that trio, and the Cardinals opted not to tender a qualifying offer to any of those players.
As a result, upon signing free agent deals with another club, the Cardinals will not be compensated for their losses. The qualifying offer is a universal one-year deal which carries a salary equal to that of the average of the 125 highest paid players in the league. This winter, that amounts to a hair over $21 million.
Goldschmidt is the only player of the six who the club might have considered qualifying, but his poor 2024 season has put him in a position where he’ll likely receive a deal well below that number in free agency. As the team continues to seek out ways to cut salary, bringing Goldschmidt back at that number is simply an untenable proposition.
40-player roster deadline
Monday also is the deadline to return players who ended the season on the 60-day injured list to the 40-player roster. Middleton, who did not pitch for the Cardinals after signing a free agent deal last winter, falls under that category. So too does lefty starter Drew Rom, who was acquired from the Baltimore Orioles at last year’s trade deadline and missed the entirety of the 2024 season after having shoulder surgery.
The Cardinals ended the season with an open spot on the roster, and they took steps on Friday to utilize some of that space. St. Louis claimed 24-year-old righty Roddery Muñoz from the Miami Marlins, adding pitching depth that can still be freely optioned to the minors in 2025 to the collection of arms which will be counted on to get them through next season.
Muñoz as a starter featured a fastball which averaged approximately 95 mph on the way to hitters and significantly higher on the way out, as he allowed an eye-popping .714 slugging percentage on that pitch, which he threw more than a quarter of the time. His numbers on his peripheral offerings – a sinker with nearly the same velocity, as well as a cutter, slider and changeup – were much more manageable, and suggest that Muñoz could benefit from some of the same pitching refinement processes which the Cardinals put into place last season.
At a minimum, the Cardinals are learning lessons from their dreadful 2023 season in which they simply ran out of available arms in the organization and were forced to turn over innings to graybeard veteran minor leaguers down the stretch, thereby failing both to win games and to advance any developmental goals.
There will be further additions in the coming days and weeks. Two weeks from Tuesday, Nov. 19, is the deadline for adding players to the 40-player roster ahead of baseball’s annual winter meetings and the Rule 5 draft. Top pitching prospects Tink Hence and Tekoah Roby require that protection this winter, as do a variety of other depth arms who the Cardinals may be inclined to protect in order to maximize their options heading into a competitive spring.
The general manager meetings are also an opportunity for team executives to lay the foundation of trade talks which could well be consummated in the immediate aftermath. It was at these meetings in 2018 that the Cardinals learned the Arizona Diamondbacks were willing to entertain a trade of Goldschmidt, and they moved rapidly to close that deal.
Now the shoe is firmly planted on the other foot. Outgoing president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, having taken on the responsibilities of the general manager for the coming season, has met with veteran players and their agents in recent weeks to gauge the flexibility of no-trade clauses and the desires of some of those players to seek more competitive environments elsewhere.
While shedding all of Nolan Arenado, Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras could shave approximately $75 million off the books for the Cardinals next season, it’s unlikely that all three will move. It’s even less likely that all three will still be Cardinals when spring training opens in February. The next three months will unfold in a way that helps define the path forward through a reset, and will also demonstrate exactly how serious the Cardinals are about fully clearing a path which they believe will lead back to winning.
This story was originally published November 4, 2024 at 4:50 PM.
