The St. Louis Cardinals have long since been focused on 2026 and beyond. But a loss to the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday night made it official: For the third straight season, there will be no playoff baseball for one of the most storied franchises in baseball.
Now, with John Mozeliak on the way out and Chaim Bloom taking over atop the Cardinals' front office, the rebuild can well and truly begin. That necessarily means offloading the team's most expensive veterans in order to clear payroll space and open up opportunities for younger players — with third baseman Nolan Arenado at the top of the list.
That faint sound you hear in the distance is a collective groan from the entire city of St. Louis, who remember how it went when the team last tried to find a trade partner for Arenado less than 12 months ago. But we have good news this time! It appears that yet another disappointing season was enough to finally convince the eight-time All-Star that maybe his future should lie elsewhere.
“I think I have to be,” Arenado told Katie Woo of The Athletic on Wednesday, when asked whether he'll be a bit more flexible when it comes to his no-trade clause this offseason.“That’s something I’ll discuss with my agent and my family. I think the discussion I’ll have with my agent for sure is that the list will be different.”
"The list," of course, refers to the list of teams Arenado told the Cardinals he'd be willing to accept a trade to last offseason. Said list initially included five teams — the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres and Houston Astros — before abruptly getting winnowed down to four when Arenado decided that he wasn't actually wild about heading to Houston after all.
On the one hand, this is a welcome development for fans ready to start taking steps toward the next competitive era of Cardinals baseball. On the other ... well, let's just say we wouldn't blame St. Louis if it was feeling a bit frustrated with its one-time franchise player right now.
For more news and rumors, check out MLB Insider Robert Murray’s work on The Baseball Insiders podcast, subscribe to The Moonshot, our weekly MLB newsletter, and join the discord to get the inside scoop during the MLB season.
Nolan Arenado has needlessly put the Cardinals in an impossible spot
It's all well and good that Arenado has finally realized what everyone has known for months now, but really — what took him so long? There's a reason why Mozeliak deemed finding an Arenado deal "priority No. 1, 2 and 3” at the start of the winter: It was clear to everyone that this current Cardinals era was in decline, and that a reset was needed.
And yet, despite claiming that what mattered most to him was competing for a World Series — and despite Mozeliak somehow finding a viable trade with an approved team — the third baseman scuttled things at the 11th hour, leaving the Cardinals with essentially no choice but to carry him on the roster but for one more pointless season. Sure enough, St. Louis went nowhere in 2025, while Arenado alternated between injured and ineffective.
Which begs the question: What else was Arenado expecting? That he'd be able to defy Father Time and years worth of declining metrics to become one of the best third basemen in the sport again? That a Cardinals team with holes all over the place would somehow find a way to miraculously contend in a loaded National League?
Shockingly, none of those things came to pass. And now Arenado is finally ready to listen to reason ... after spending the last few months making it even more difficult for Bloom to find a trade partner this coming offseason. Arenado is now a year older — he'll be 35 next April — and is coming off by far the worst offensive season of his career, with a .660 OPS over 105 games. Even his defense at the hot corner has become much closer to "good" than "absolutely elite".
And sure, there's one year less on the remainder of Arenado's contract, but said contract still has two more guaranteed seasons at more than $25 million per. That's ... a whole lot of money to pay for a below-average hitter who can't run and can only play third base (which he doesn't even do all that well anymore). If it felt like a minor miracle that Mozeliak was able to find a workable deal last offseason, just wait until you see what this year's market looks like. It's hard to believe that St. Louis will get anything of value in return for him now; heck, it's hard to believe that any contender would be willing to take all or even most of that contract regardless of what they're sending back.
It's admirable that Arenado wanted to go down with the ship, and you can't blame him for not wanting to uproot his family to a brand new city when it was his contractual right to decline any given trade. But it's also infuriating that now he's willing to see what Cardinals fans have known all along, when it might be too late for the team to do anything about it.