Cardinals moving fast on roster reboot, even with no MLB deadline for deals
To the chagrin of many in baseball, there is no hard offseason deadline by which pencils go down and deals must be completed.
The league office has long favored such a deadline, both as a driver of excitement and as a mechanism for depressing salaries, but baseball moves at its own pace. Rob Manfred hasn’t managed to affix a clock to December just yet.
The tangle of interwoven threads and potential deals accounting for what has become a traditionally slow pace in the offseason has placed the St. Louis Cardinals in the unusual position of having a number of deals to complete without clear certainty on the best order in which to do so.
It is overwhelmingly likely that Brendan Donovan and JoJo Romero will be traded this winter. There is every expectation that Nolan Arenado will follow. The Cardinals will—and have—taken calls on Willson Contreras, Nolan Gorman, Lars Nootbaar and others.
When is enough enough, and when is a deal truly a deal?
“In my experience, usually the holidays are a little more of a de facto deadline for people that just want to get their business done and then maybe take a breather,” president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom said. “Not a real deadline, and sometimes things drag on. I’ve had times in my career where we’ve had to get everybody away from the egg nog and get their attention.”
There are human elements and variables that impact the pace as well. Sonny Gray was shipped to Boston two days before Thanksgiving, in part because the veteran controlled his destination via no-trade clause and was eager to have his situation settled in time to handle little things that make the experience more comfortable, including finding a place to live for spring training and the season, building communication with new coaches and more.
Gray had that power, and the Cardinals were comfortable knowing they had received as much from the deal as they were likely to get.
“Little bit of instinct said this is when this should happen, and we have an opportunity to do our best business if we do it now,” Bloom recalled. “It’s a little bit different in every case, and you’re not always going to necessarily know that, but that’s part of where experience and just making sure you get good candor from your group, that people are willing to speak up if something seems like a time to pounce, it all comes together in those decisions.”
Bloom recalled a year when he was in the Tampa Bay Rays front office in which he and now-Rays baseball chief Erik Neander tried to keep families and staff as engaged as possible in the week between Christmas and New Year’s—then found themselves on a conference call to lock down a free agent on Dec. 27.
He also recalled an instance “a couple years ago on Christmas Day” when he was on a similar phone call—a task that brought a degree of annoyance even as he was doing business.
“Famously, I’m not even a Christmas celebrant,” cracked Bloom, who is Jewish.
It’s never as simple as business being driven by a desire to get the right team gear under the tree, but the human element in baseball can emerge in unexpected places.
There were some around the Cardinals last winter who, aware of the challenges they faced with Arenado’s short list of trade preferences, expected him to emerge from the holidays with a new perspective—in part because spending significant time around well-meaning people seeking answers you can’t provide can be trying.
This winter’s Cardinals have one clear advantage over last winter’s: They are trying to trade more players who are in higher demand around the league.
Bloom has acknowledged the wide interest in Donovan and has stopped just short of doing so with Romero. The agreement reached over the weekend with right-hander Dustin May doesn’t place undue roster pressure on the team, but it does suggest they’ve made enough progress in potential deals to have a sense of what their remaining needs will be once those are complete.
“Everybody involved in this is a human being, and there’s something to be said for that as like a little bit of a soft deadline sometimes that clubs, players, agents all feel,” Bloom reiterated. “But it takes however long it takes to get the right outcome.”
Those boxes haven’t yet been unwrapped. It’s unclear whether they’ve even been ordered. There are bows at the ready, though, and the countdown is real—and also fake.
