The Cardinals’ deadline success and sorting out the rotation

The trade deadline was a big win for the Cardinals, but decisions lie ahead

It says here John Mozeliak and the rest of baseball ops had an excellent trade deadline. 

In the three-way trade with the White Sox and Dodgers, they filled two significant holes at a very modest cost. My enthusiasm for Erick Fedde has been detailed previously in this space, and the rebuilt right-hander immediately becomes the Game 2 starter for the Cardinals in any hypothetical playoff series. He’s not a dominator, but Fedde’s deep repertoire is fully commanded after a 2023 season in Korea in which he refashioned himself. As well, he’s under contract for 2025 at a salary of $7.5 million, which is deliriously cheap for a useful starting pitcher. 

Outfielder, warrior-poet, and old friend Tommy Pham also came over in that swap, and he remains a potent force against left-handed pitching. That’s something the Cardinals sorely need, especially in the outfield. Yes, he’s 36, but over the last three seasons he has an expected slash line of .297/.370/.518 against the opposite side. This season alone, that expected slash line against lefties is .310/.416/.480. Pham’s glove of course isn’t what it used to be, but the Cardinals can keep him in a corner spot and let Lars Nootbaar patrol center when a left-hander is starting for the opposition. Bless Michael Siani’s fielding now and forever, but he needs to be confined to late-inning defensive replacement duty against lefties. Pham lets that happen and gives the Cardinals a middle-of-the-order presence when he’s in a platoon-advantaged situation. 

Let’s appreciate that Pham has already provided us with the most electric moment of the 2024 season to date:

To get all this, the Cardinals gave up Tommy Edman, a league-average-ish hitter in the best of times whose value is driven by multi-positional defensive excellence and strong base-running, plus a bottom-rung, 17-year-old arm in Oliver Gonzalez. Edman is a good player and a highly efficient use of roster space. The reality, though, is that Edman hasn’t played for the Cardinals this season thanks to a plodding recovery from offseason wrist surgery – a recovery that’s been further complicated by recent ankle issues. Wrist problems are tricky things for hitters, especially when just returning from one, and Edman is not a hitter with much room for decline at the plate. Given those uncertainties, I’m surprised the Dodgers gave up as much as they did for him (their package of prospects went to the White Sox as, in essence, Chicago’s return for Fedde and Pham). Eyeball the L.A. roster, including deadline add Jack Flaherty, and you can see the Dodgers seem to be fairly aggressive when it comes to signing off on player medicals. That tendency accrued to the Cardinals’ advantage at the deadline. 

There’s also the money. Edman is owed the balance of a $7 million salary for this season and is under contract for 2025, his walk year, at a rate of $9.5 million. On the Cardinals’ side, Fedde’s commitments are noted above, and Pham is due the remainder of a $3.5 million salary for 2024. Call it roughly a wash. That’s notable because John Denton at the house organ recently reported this: 

“The Cardinals front office has been informed by management that the club is not positioned to take on significant additional salary in coming years via a trade, per the source.”

If this is accurate, then it means the front office may have been operating under constraints leading up to the deadline, which would make their work all the more impressive. As for said constraints, I’ll assume the reason, or at least the convenient rationale, is declining attendance and the ongoing uncertainties surrounding the Cardinals’ local-broadcast revenues (the latter a consequence of the Diamond/Bally’s bankruptcy proceedings). Given that the Cardinals are supposedly receiving their full rights payment for 2024 or, if not, possibly getting backstopped thanks to the recent MLB-MLBPA agreement, I don’t think much of these reported limitations put in place by the DeWitts. That, however, is a jeremiad for another time. The point here is that three-way swap for Fedde and Pham is impressive in any context from the Cardinals’ standpoint and may have been even more impressive once full context is applied. Speaking of context, the going rates for starting pitchers this deadline seemed to be quite overheated, but I’ll repeat the Cardinals appear to have paid quite modestly for Fedde. It’s just deeply impressive work by the front-office decision-makers. 

The other, lesser swap is the one that sent stalled-out former top prospect Dylan Carlson to the Rays for 33-year-old right-handed reliever Shawn Armstrong. The addition of Pham meant Carlson in essence had to go, and frankly it was time for both sides to part ways. You can squint and see some trade value, as Carlson is a former first-rounder who populated top-prospect lists and had a reasonably promising rookie season in 2021. As well, he’s still just 25 with two full seasons of team control remaining. However, he’s also been injured often, and, thanks in part to those injuries and inconsistent playing time, he’s struggled at the plate since that rookie campaign. He’s an obvious “change of scenery” candidate, but that kind of player tends not to afford much leverage to the team trading him away. So you wind up with a 33-year-old rental reliever with an ERA in the 5.00’s. 

With Armstrong, the Cardinals are betting on the FIP (it’s 3.76 versus that ERA of 5.40). He’s also not far removed from a 2023 season in which he put up an ERA of 1.38 and an FIP of 2.54 in 52 innings. From that season to this, Armstrong is throwing his four-seamer much more and leaning a bit less on his sinker-cutter combo. Maybe there’s an opportunity there for a change in approach. More broadly, Armstrong has a deep repertoire as relievers go, which means room for adjustments at the pitch-mix level (ramping up use of his slider is a potentially intriguing approach). Yes, I was hoping Carlson would fetch more than this, but that didn’t happen for mostly understandable reasons. 

This deadline discussion flows nicely into a consideration of what’s next for the rotation.