Cardinals looking to capture Disney magic for roster reboot. What’s next?
It’s the most magical place on earth, as long as you are willing to ignore the shrieks and squeals of disappointment coming from a trip not fully realized in its hopes and dreams.
And that’s just from the executives in the team suites.
In the shadow of Spaceship Earth, the St. Louis Cardinals are less interested in a slow-motion ride through their evolutionary history than in a breakneck pace of trades and transactions to clear most of their existing financial commitments, ostensibly to rebuild a firmer foundation for competitive success in the years ahead.
Practically, that means full engagement in the trade market and working through obligations to players with no-trade clauses, as well as the desire to move contracts that no longer fit their competitive window.
Trading Nolan Arenado is a primary goal—and one that seems more achievable this winter than last—though it is similarly ensnared by the pace of the free agent market. Trading Willson Contreras is somewhat less urgent, but still a real possibility. Three years ago, manager Oli Marmol and then-president of baseball operations John Mozeliak spent hours meeting with Contreras at his Orlando-area home to discuss his future and how he fit into the Cardinals’ plans at that time.
That plan has since changed, and the team’s current timeline for contention does not align with the two guaranteed seasons remaining on Contreras’ contract. At the end of the season, he expressed a desire to remain a Cardinal, but as the winter has played out and steps have been taken away from contention—notably, the trade of Sonny Gray to Boston—that desire has softened.
As this year’s meetings open in Disney’s constructed wonderland, the first meaningful event took place Sunday night. The Contemporary Eras Committee, which considered the careers of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and others, elected only one person to the Hall of Fame: second baseman Jeff Kent, who will join the other members of the class chosen by the baseball writers over the next month.
Bonds, Clemens, Gary Sheffield and Fernando Valenzuela each received fewer than five votes from the 16-member committee of Hall of Famers, historians, executives and media members. Those results, more than Kent’s election, strongly indicate minimal appetite among baseball’s elite for excusing the presumed offenses of the sport’s most visible figures embroiled in performance-enhancing drug controversy.
If the week starts with discussion around a second baseman, it may continue in that direction for the Cardinals. Brendan Donovan remains one of the most attractive trade candidates on the market. Even as the Cardinals tell other teams that it will require a high price to consummate a deal, it would be a surprise if he is in St. Louis for Opening Day. With two years of team control remaining, Donovan’s skill set makes him an ideal fit for most of the game’s contenders, and no matter how high the price may be now, it will likely be met.
Nolan Gorman also could be traded this winter, though for a smaller return and with an eye toward finding a team that believes it can tap into his prodigious power. The list of players who certainly won’t be traded is much shorter than the list who might, putting the Cardinals at the center of this week’s action even as the free agent market moves on almost entirely without them.
It’s largely futile to try to track an order of operations. Teams will finalize trades as soon as they are confident that the price is right, and that changes with the vagaries of the market. Perhaps the most essential utility of the winter meetings is bringing decision-makers into the same space, pairing easy conversation over cocktails about life and family with the business of baseball.
For those who have spent much of their life in the game—or those who hope to—it is an extended grip-and-grin, searching for the next job, the first job, or the open door. For teams with players to move, it’s the same dance, but with stakes that affect many more people.
To reach these meetings requires driving beneath the Disney World welcome marquee and entering a fantasy property with a footprint anchored in the developed swamps of Florida. It is a place that once existed only in a mind, and through meticulous planning became a world-renowned juggernaut.
The Cardinals would like to follow in those footsteps. But a roster is not built in a week. Neither was Epcot—and it seems to be doing fine.
