Opinion: St. Louis Cardinals’ trades reflect team’s inertia
That’s it?
Whether it’s the number of deals, the quality of the return, or even the explanations offered in their defense, that is the pervasive reaction to what exiting president of baseball operations John Mozeliak and the St. Louis Cardinals pulled off and didn’t pull off at the trade deadline. There are no surprises coming, no shocks waiting to be pulled across the finish line, no dramatic deals that reshape the path of the franchise.
There’s only sending out three rental relievers for six prospects, five of whom are actuarially more likely to be teammates with Yadier Molina’s teenage son than anyone who played with Molina himself (and not lefty starter Mason Molina, part of the return for Phil Maton).
MLB Pipeline ranked four of the six new acquisitions among the team’s top 30, with Triple-A slugger Blaze Jordan coming in at 19th. Jesús Báez (6th) and Nate Dohm (15th) slot in ahead of him, and Mason Molina (26th) fills in behind, but each of the three of them have an expected arrival date of 2027, which may even be optimistic.
It would be a deadline that benefits Chaim Bloom’s incoming administration if it was also a deadline – or a preceding year – that succeeded in sweeping some redundant pieces from the board, but it wasn’t that either. The Cardinals, by Mozeliak’s own admission, did not get particularly close to moving on from any of their glut of slightly above league average lefty bats, leaving a roster to be constructed from a number of similar component parts, each with the same edges that don’t quite fit together.
“We got hit a lot on our left-handed hitters, but none of the types of offers we were getting for those players were compelling for us to do it,” Mozeliak said Thursday. “We were not motivated to move players that we had under control, unless we were, to put it mildly, blown away, and we just weren’t.”
It is difficult to understand why they wouldn’t be motivated to move some of those players, or why it would take being more than blown away to find that motivation. The Cardinals have constructed a redundant roster with not enough openings, and with Nolan Arenado’s performance and trade value seemingly continuing to sink into the morass, that situation is getting worse, not better.
“These things tend to work themselves out over time,” Mozeliak opined. “You might say to me, ‘Well no, they haven’t,’ but they typically do, and so, patience.”
Well no, they haven’t.
The issue with this deadline – the issue for this administration, going on several years – is that the insistence upon patience is not warranted by actions which might suggest it will be rewarded. The vague air of condescension that has pervaded front office communications for years comes backed by the authority of World Series rings that are now old enough to be gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.
Trading away rental relievers for speculative prospect returns is not a high-skill needle threading, as these things go. The Cardinals succeeded in achieving the bare minimum that was necessary for a team not progressing in the standings. That’s tolerable, but it’s not laudatory.
It’s also difficult to square the team’s inherent passivity in roster management with ownership issues, given that the San Diego Padres were far and away the most aggressive team at the deadline in the midst of their owners filing lawsuits against each other. The Minnesota Twins, with the Pohlad family desperately seeking a sale, traded away 10 players from their big league roster. Their fans are less happy than Cardinals fans, and for good reason, but no one would accuse Derek Falvey of not being decisive.
St. Louis Cardinals hand future to Chaim Bloom
A cynical person would note that, incoming constitutional challenges aside, the Missouri legislature recently approved a measure that would guarantee 50% state funding of any stadium rehabilitation project of at least $500 million, which leaves ownership with a quarter billion dollars of funny money to pour into the crown of their real estate jewel. Perhaps that’s enough to be willing to embrace the hit of interest and attendance that will come with a full, to-the-studs rebuild. It’s a dangerous game, but not one they’re necessarily averse to playing.
The risks the Cardinals choose to take and avoid run in perpetual contradiction to each other, which is what makes this relatively quiet Thursday so fascinating. It’s no favor to Bloom, either, that he’ll be the one left holding the bag when it comes time to trade away players to whom fans have grown attached; his experience in Boston is more than enough for him to know how that generally is perceived by a baseball-mad city.
For better or worse, this is now his ship to steer in everything but name. With a somewhat unusual air of quiet around him, Mozeliak said Thursday evening that his immediate plans were to head home and pour a cocktail, the rewards of a job done. His race is more or less run, save for the tasks necessary to keep the lights on over the next few months.
The vision is going to change, and it’s fair to be nervous about the financial waters into which those who formerly stewarded the Tampa Bay and Cleveland organizations are going to head. But there will be no more net-net, no more arbitrage, no more thinly sourced rumors that fail to account for the intractable inertia that has defined Cardinals baseball over the last decade. That part is over.
That’s it.
This story was originally published August 1, 2025 at 12:27 PM.
