Cardinals arrive at Winter Meetings ready to make deals for some of their stars
The last time Major League Baseball’s annual winter meetings were at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Albert Pujols left the St. Louis Cardinals for a massive free agent deal with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and an unfortunate meeting attendee was caught on camera on MLB Network stumbling into a water fixture of the lobby of the hotel.
Metaphors abound, as does risk.
Baseball’s chief decision makers descended Sunday through gray skies over Texas with hopes of avoiding stumbles of either kind, but knowing full well that at least a few of their peers are bound to end up in roughly the same spot.
For the St. Louis Cardinals, this week’s meetings will be defined in large part by the market around them. Having already pledged determined inactivity in the free agent market, they’re left facing down a series of reorienting trades that will likely only be able to be consummated as free agent options dwindle and teams turn to alternative methods of filling their own roster gaps.
Third baseman Nolan Arenado looms as the winter’s biggest question for the Cardinals, though the question now seems to be more around the destination to which he’ll be traded rather than whether he’ll be traded at all.
Both sides are prepared for Arenado to report to spring training in Florida in February if an agreeable deal doesn’t present itself, but the much more likely outcome is that Arenado will be playing third for a new team on opening day and the Cardinals will seek to benefit from the financial relief that decision provides them.
The San Francisco Giants signed former Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Willy Adames to a seven-year, $182 million contract on Saturday, jumping the line ahead of Juan Soto’s anticipated big decision at some point in the coming days.
Evaluators considered Adames to be perhaps the second-best free agent position player available after Soto, and the expectation was that one or more teams who fell out of the Soto race would turn to Adames as their top alternate option.
Now, with Adames off the market, Arenado is increasing in appeal. Though he’s spent his career at shortstop, Adames was thought to be willing to move to third base if that was a better fit for a potential suitor. The New York Yankees, for instance, have Anthony Volpe entrenched at short, but an obvious need at third.
Finding a fit for Arenado will not be easy. He holds a no-trade clause and is believed to have a short list of teams to whom he would accept a trade. That list is expected to be heavy on winning teams and the west coast, which means the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers would have to be considered a strong possibility, though the fit on their roster remains unclear.
An easier player to move is likely to be left-handed starter Steven Matz, who has one year remaining on his contract at a $12.5 million salary. While that might seem significant given Matz’s struggles to stay on the field over his first three seasons in St. Louis, it’s imminently affordable given the players who have already signed in free agency.
The Cardinals may view moving Matz as a necessary preamble to the rest of their pitching plans for the winter. Their desire to pare down salary has been well established, and was largely behind the decision to decline the team’s 2025 option for Kyle Gibson and instead pay his $1 million buyout.
If Matz were to be traded to a team which took on his whole contract, it would open up both cash and a roster spot which could be used on Gibson, whose clubhouse presence and steady innings were both highly valued in 2024. Even as the Cardinals seek to open up opportunities for young players, there remains a need for quality big league pitching to soak up some of the long summer days.
Having lived through 2023 in which their available innings bottomed out and they struggled to crawl through the season’s finish line, the Cardinals are well aware of the struggles that come from running out of innings. And they’re also well aware that those innings in the dog days are not always conducive to development; putting pitchers in a position to succeed requires avoiding obvious situations where they’re liable to be clobbered.
As the Cardinals signal publicly that they’re more apt to hold on to closer Ryan Helsley than trade him, they’ll continue to receive offers for his services and then determine whether any tip the balance to a different decision.
Otherwise, aside from minor signings designed to increase organizational depth, the week and the winter are centered around working that trade market, and hoping that the offers they receive will free up the cash and the spots they desire.
At a minimum, this week is likely to be less emotional than the 2011 trip to Dallas for those around the team. It may turn out to be a similar franchise turning point as the Pujols departure, but their decision to secure a new direction remains firm.
It will remain incumbent upon them to guarantee that direction doesn’t lead them to a face plant into a hotel fountain, or any other ignominious end.
