Nol Country for Old Men: Diamondbacks Trade for Arenado
The St. Louis Cardinals, or what’s left of them, have traded third baseman Nolan Arenado and cash to the Arizona Diamondbacks for right-handed pitcher Jack Martinez.
Arenado was one of the best players of the 2010s, a three-time National League home run champ and an elite defensive third baseman. In eight seasons with the Rockies, Arenado made five All-Star teams and finished in the top eight in MVP voting five times. He made the All-Star team and pulled off the Gold Glove-Silver Slugger double every season from 2015 to 2018.
On the strength of those performances, the Rockies signed Arenado to one of the richest contracts in baseball history — nine years, $275 million. After two years, they shipped him to St. Louis, where the Cardinals lived out the bargain of the quarter-billion-dollar extension: A couple great seasons, followed by gradual decline and now decrepitude, all before the deal runs out.
The Cardinals have been trying to ship Arenado off for so long I actually wrote about his decline 13 months ago. Arenado averaged a 130 wRC+ and 6.0 WAR per season with the Rockies from 2016 to 2019, then a 131 wRC+ and 5.8 WAR per season in 2021 and 2022, his first two seasons in St. Louis. But after his last great season in 2022, Arenado started losing power, bleeding walks, and shrinking his defensive radius. In 2023 and 2024, he averaged 104 wRC+ and 2.9 WAR.
Which is still just fine! When future Hall of Famers get old, they often turn into solid-but-not-great players. Unfortunately, the next step often involves going off a cliff, which is what happened to Arenado in 2025: 84 wRC+, 0.9 WAR in 107 games.
Congratulations, we’ve discovered the world’s most expensive Jared Triolo.
And yet, Arenado is due $27 million this coming season and $15 million in 2027.
That incongruity between salary, production, and projection is common at the back end of long contracts like Arenado’s. So it is with great surprise that I offer the following analysis: I don’t hate this trade for anyone.
Well, I hate this trade because it well and truly kills the “National Arenadics and Space Administration” joke I had teed up when Arenado vetoed a trade to Houston last winter. But that’s a petty, personal opinion. The Cardinals and Diamondbacks both did OK here.
On our player pages, we have a little widget up in the top right-hand corner for news, including links to recent FanGraphs articles where the player in question has been tagged, as well as snippets from Rotowire. I believe the best summation of Arenado’s situation in St. Louis can be found there.
Before the Arenado trade broke on Tuesday, the most recent Rotowire blurb read: “Cardinals president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom said Tuesday that releasing Arenado is ‘not an option,’ Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat reports.”
It’s never a good sign when a POBO has to answer questions about whether he’s going to release his most expensive player.
And that’s the baseline the Cardinals were working from: Arenado is declining to replacement level, and the Cardinals owed him $37 million over the next two seasons no matter what. (That’s $42 million, less the $5 million Colorado was already due to pay down.) The question facing Bloom was whether Arenado was doing more harm than good in the lineup. Again, not an enviable position.
The Cardinals are paying Arenado’s salary down to $5 million in 2026 and $6 million in 2027, which means they’re on the hook for $26 million in dead money, again, accounting for what they’re receiving from Colorado. But that’s less than $37 million. A lot less.
As an aside, three different teams are going to pay Arenado at least $5 million this coming season, which has to be some kind of record. Allow me to present the following humorous table:
| Player | Salary |
|---|---|
| Nolan Arenado (Cardinals’ Portion) | $17,000,000 |
| Dustin May | $12,000,000 |
| Brendan Donovan | $5,800,000 |
| Lars Nootbaar | $5,350,000 |
| Nolan Arenado (Rockies’ Portion) | $5,000,000 |
| Nolan Arenado (Diamondbacks’ Portion) | $5,000,000 |
| JoJo Romero | $4,260,000 |
| Andre Pallante | $4,000,000 |
| Ryne Stanek | $3,500,000 |
| Alec Burleson | $3,300,000 |
| Nolan Gorman | $2,655,000 |
| Matthew Liberatore | $2,260,000 |
The prospect the Cardinals are getting, Jack Martinez, didn’t get a mention in our recent Diamondbacks prospect list, which went 56 deep, plus honorable mentions. That’s instructive, but according to Eric Longenhagen, Martinez isn’t nothing. Says Eric:
Martinez spent two years at Trinity University in Texas, one at UL-Lafayette (mostly as a reliever) and then his senior year at Arizona State, where his delivery changed; he posted good peripheral stats (most notably a 32.3% strikeout rate in 15 starts over 77.1 innings) but a bloated ERA. The Diamondbacks drafted him in the eighth round, and signed Martinez for a little over $167,000, which is a meaningful bonus for a senior sign, indicating that Arizona thought he was among that demographic’s best prospects. He didn’t pitch at an affiliate after the draft.
Martinez’s fastball sits 93 mph with some natural cut action and tends to finish on the glove side of the plate. This pairs nicely with his tailing changeup, which often freezes left-handed hitters as it runs back over the inside corner. Martinez opens his hips up really big on his stride home, and his plant foot lands way toward the first base side of the mound. It’s jarring for the hitter at first, and also helps create effective angles with his heater and cambio. The tweaks ASU made to his delivery (Martinez was getting deeper into his legs last year and his arm slot came down) accentuated this even further, and his changeup played like a plus-plus pitch in 2025. But the lower slot also robbed him of some breaking ball depth, and that pitch generated below-average miss and was relegated to strike-getting duty. Overall, Martinez has been a fair strike-thrower who definitely belonged in a college rotation, but he’s more on the reliever/swingman fringe in that regard as a pro prospect.
Martinez was a nice senior sign by Arizona and is a fine sleeper pro prospect who has a non-zero chance of being a big league starter. He has a real weapon in that changeup, and has some markers that one might associate with late-bloomers: He spent years at small programs and got better as soon as he left, he’s made tangible mechanical changes, and he did so while his role expanded to ASU’s weekend rotation. All this was true before Martinez received pro instruction, and that’s exciting. But also, Martinez was an eighth round senior sign just a couple of months ago, and his more likely outcomes are in the swingman/long relief area unless his breaking ball effectiveness or command takes a meaningful step forward. This is the sort of player who you could have in the Others of Note section of a list as a player to monitor.
You can see a little bit of Martinez here:
So yeah, this is a senior sign who’ll be 23 when he makes his professional debut this spring, but a good prospect within those highly restrictive parameters.
Real talk: The Cardinals got $11 million in salary relief and a human man with four limbs and a head for a guy they were probably going to have to cut. They also clear a full-time spot at third base that they can use to find out once and for all if Gorman’s any good. And as trade rumors continue to follow Brendan Donovan like an imaginary friend, the Cardinals’ infield could be even more different come Opening Day. Hello, JJ Wetherholt.
If this trade is a good piece of business for St. Louis, doesn’t that logically make it an overpay for the Diamondbacks?
To an extent. The Diamondbacks have, in fairness, needed a third baseman since they traded Eugenio Suárez in July. Jordan Lawlar seemed to have the inside track on that position; Lawlar had been the Diamondbacks’ top prospect for so long I think he was in the same draft class as Junior Spivey. But a combination of injuries and the emergence of Geraldo Perdomo as a star has kept Lawlar merely on the verge of a regular major league job. And he didn’t help himself by hitting .182 with 26 strikeouts in 74 big league plate appearances in 2025.
Maybe Lawlar, for whatever reason, isn’t the answer. The Diamondbacks are apparently going to give him a run in center field, another position of need. Arizona could also turn to 2023 first-round pick Tommy Troy, who made it to Triple A last season, but Troy didn’t exactly set the world on fire there. He probably isn’t ready.
Arizona had been linked to Alex Bregman, but that rumor seemed to be predicated on the Diamondbacks trading Ketel Marte, who’ll make $15 million in 2026 and is signed through 2030 with a player option for 2031. If he’s on the team, apparently Arizona needed to look down a shelf or two for help at third base.
Thanks to the Cardinals’ largesse (or desperation, depending on how charitable you want to be), Arenado is cheap for the first time in about 10 years. Though again, it’s fair to wonder how helpful he can actually be at this point in his career.
I think Arenado’s cooked, but it’s fair to bake in some uncertainty about the extent to which he’s cooked. Surely Arenado’s no more cooked now than Evan Longoria was when he and the Diamondbacks went to the World Series in 2023. Remember, the Rockies traded Arenado after an even worse season than this one, in 2020, and he bounced back. And if we want to narrow the sample to Cardinals corner infielders, nobody in the history of baseball has ever been more cooked than late-career Albert Pujols, who signed off with an unlikely 22-dinger, 148 wRC+ season at age 42.
Obviously, Arenado is five years older now than he was in 2021, so I’m not saying there’s even a remote chance he rebounds to the level he was at in 2022. But if he goes back to being a league-average hitter rather than a mid-80s wRC+ guy? He could be OK. And instead of playing for a team that’s going nowhere, he’ll be lining up alongside the best middle-infield duo in the league, on a club that’s got a little juice. And if you think — as I do — that Arenado was kind of overrated at his peak due to playing in Colorado, well, Arizona has the second-highest elevation of any ballpark in the league.
If Arenado is a 2.0 WAR player, $5 million is a bargain. On the free agent market, $5 million is barely enough to buy you Austin Hedges, who hasn’t hit .200 since 2018. It’s nothing. And with all due respect to Martinez, so is the prospect Arizona gave up. If Martinez turns into a stud, it’ll be because of some radical transformation he undergoes in St. Louis, not a failure of self-scouting on Arizona’s part. And at the risk of being unsentimental, the most likely outcome is that none of you reading this are ever going to think about this guy again.
The name and the contract involved here make this sound like a big trade on the surface, but both Arenado (and his compensation) have been diminished to the point where the on-field impact of this move will probably be insignificant for anyone. The Cardinals saved a few bucks, and the Diamondbacks have a low-risk, low-reward shot at extracting the last drops of talent from a star on the wane. Let’s see if it makes a difference.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
First of all, I absolutely love how Arenado’s seasons played per team on his extension is going to be a perfectly normal distribution. 2 years with the Rockies, 5 years with the Cardinals, 2 years with the Diamondbacks.
As far as the actual trade, it’s fine. The best alternative for the Cardinals was releasing him, so I don’t see any reason to complain on their end. For the Diamondbacks, they’re paying him so little that there’s barely any downside if you need to cut him, and you aren’t getting a 1-2 WAR third baseman in free agency.
Also, you could have made the table even funnier if you included the actual highest-paid Cardinal, Sonny Gray of the Boston Red Sox.
That’s assuming the Diamondbacks don’t trade him again, or that he’s so bad this season they just decide to cut him.
If the Cardinals had kept him, they would’ve simply played him. Now that’s he’s healthy again, he’d still easily be their best option at 3B save for a huge unexpected breakout by Gorman.
Do the D-Backs have a coherent plan here? Up until a few days ago, they were shopping their best player, which would have put them in full rebuild mode. Now they’ve pulled him off the market and acquired Arenado when they have at least 3 decent, fairly close prospects who could have filled that spot (Lawlar, Troy, Grover). Seems like a fairly abrupt pivot
And Blaze Alexander! Who is in the majors and has hit adequately!
i don’t think they were really shopping Marte, it seemed more like reporters would ask them “If someone offered you the sun, moon, and stars for Ketel Marte and threw in a lifetime supply of Nojito Spindrift,* would you say no?” and they said “Uh… maybe not?”
*not a paid product placement but it could be! call me!
Also, the D-Backs often make abrupt pivots as Kendrick decides he wants to bring in a big name a month before Spring Training.
Them “shopping Marte” was just Hazen saying, “maybe if you guys want to give us half of your top 10 prospects and a MLB starter, we’ll think about it!” They weren’t serious.
Lawlar hasn’t made the jump, he’s struggled mightily in his sample size so far, and now AZ wants to make him a superutility guy. Troy and Grover likely aren’t ready yet. The move is good process for AZ. They get an experienced player to bridge their rookies along at a cheap price tag and hopefully there’s a dead cat bounce. If he sucks, oh well they’re down $11m which is basically chump change in today’s money, and then they call up the prospects to try out. If he doesn’t suck then they look smarter than we think they are now.
Maybe don’t believe every story the entertainment biz prints for mass consumption and exist most in the real
One rather insignificant fact about Jack Martinez that hasn’t been reported is the way he pronounces his last name. It’s not the more common Mar-TEE-nez, but rather pronounced MAR-te-nez. It was halfway through ASU’s season last year before I discovered his more unique pronunciation. Hey, not a real important factoid, but if we’re going to quickly forget the dude we might as well say his name the way he prefers before he’s out of our memory banks.
If it’s interesting, it’s important, even if only in a small way. So thank for your service!
Common thing from past generations was to drop the “tilde” ie Martínez to Martinez, to anglicize the pronunciation.
That’s an acute accent, not a tilde.
That said, even some native Spanish speakers drop the accent or spell it both ways. Technically Martínez is correct, though.
It’s amazing how little this move matters. Definitely wouldn’t have seen Arenado being this irrelevant after the 2022 season. Or even after 2023. Kind of saw this coming last offseason because he posted a 3.2% Barrel% in 2024 but this is still weird.
I think I prefer Blaze Alexander at this point at third base. He has some pretty big platoon splits at this point in his career but his career wRC+ against right handers is about the same as what Arenado did last year.
Arenado had reverse platoon splits in both 2023 and 2024, maybe they’re planning on doing an unconventional platoon?
They also need two outfielders now that Jake McCarthy is in Denver. I would hope that Blaze Alexander is not one of the guys they are counting on for that. If he has to fill in sometimes that’s a different story, but he’s the first guy up at second or third base when those guys get hurt or need days off.
Maybe they can trade Lawlar to a team who still thinks he can play the infield. Groover is the post-Arenado future at third base now and the middle infield is locked up.
I would suggest they trade him for Kristian Campbell but the Red Sox definitely do not need another guy who is not an infielder, and Campbell looks way more promising as a hitter than Lawlar right now.
Maybe they can convert Tommy Troy to CF full time, he did play there a little bit this year.
This is Alek Thomas erasure! This is his year, baby!
– Definitely not Alek Thomas’ dad
Ha, Alek Thomas is barely in 5th outfielder territory at this point. He can stand in CF and hit ninth in the lineup and it won’t be the end of the world, that’s it.
That’s better than Tim Tawa, who is in replacement-level territory right now. Although at least Tim Tawa hasn’t failed to hit for more than half a season.
He’s also better than Jorge Barrosa, who I am not sure deserves to be on a 40-man roster right now.
The idea of an Alek Thomas / Kristian Robinson platoon sounds pretty miserable, but better than Alek Thomas as an everyday guy.
Why would you platoon a guy who plays excellent 3B defense and still had a decent 95 OPS+ last year when he wasn’t playing hurt through the entire month of July?
“Why would you platoon a guy who couldn’t hit the ball hard in two consecutive years because he is constantly hurt” is a question that answers itself.
Although I guess technically that is better phrased as “why would you reduce playing time” rather than “why would you platoon,” the platooning is theoretically a possibility because of the weird reverse splits.
But I am not totally confident that is real. The main issue is that he seems to be dealing with back and / or shoulder injuries on a regular basis with the occasional forearm tendinitis and hand injuries thrown in for good measure. This is the age when this stuff becomes more noticeable. I don’t doubt he could hit well when healthy but he doesn’t seem to have been healthy in two years now so unless a team has a time sharing plan to keep him from getting hurt again I don’t see what would change. The Cardinals training staff clearly isn’t great at preventing injury but surely they are not *that* bad.
I know offseason workouts are largely to be ignored, but I saw a video of Arenado this offseason and his swing looks a lot different. Almost unrecognizable. He’s always had the weird like abbreviated follow through. Even that looked different.
I remember how interesting his spray chart was. Even when he was playing great in Stl it didn’t resemble his prior hitting. Seems to have been a conscious effort to pull everything (which a lot of guys start to do when they no longer have cf power). Haven’t looked for a couple years since I have always just crossed him off any draft sheet (I know this isn’t about fantasy) but iirc he didn’t hit a ball to the wall in CF for like 3 seasons. That included time in stl when number were good. His early career was more using the entire field. Here is to hoping he bounces back, seems like a good guy and is clearly putting in the work. I doubt he does, but lots of hof type players have a dead cat bounce late it seems.
Let’s be clear: Arenado’s always had more than a little lift+pull to his game. The combination of park and aging meant that anything hit oppo wasn’t really valuable, so it made sense to go full Paredes. The fact that the walks disappeared when he left Colorado makes me wonder how much the effect of altitude on breaking stuff helped him.
Do I smell a double reunion?? Goldschmidt with his original team and also with his former hot corner buddy?
They should go full nostalgia and see if they can bring back Patrick Corbin and David Peralta too.
They should bring back true Dbacks legend Starling Marte!
They need a CF, maybe they can grab Steve Finley
I believe Jordan Lawlar’s full name is Junior Spivery Jr, although my memory isn’t always the best.
Spivey-but-not-injured would be a pretty good outcome! Although that’s also a concern with Lawlar.
Also this is the second time I’ve seen Spivey mentioned in the last few days and now I will be racking my brain to try and figure out what the other one was… oh yeah, Jay Jaffe’s Matt Kemp retrospective. (Spivey roomed with and kinda mentored fellow Oklahoman Matt Kemp in the Arizona Fall League.)
So what’s the difference between Arenado and Ryan McMahon? I don’t see a lot of difference, MacMahon graded out better last year than Arenado defensively. The Yankees gave up one fv 40, a 35+ prospect and assumed all of McMahon’s remaining salary which is for significantly more money than AZ is assuming here. Arenado offers more upside at the plate.
10% age / injury concerns
20% that it’s the offseason and not the trade deadline
70% that he has a no-trade clause and can tell the Cardinals to pound sand if they don’t get him to his preferred destination
Would move some of that 70% over to “the Yankees were absolutely desperate for a third baseman at the trade deadline.” They had been giving the majority of the 3B starts to Oswald Peraza, who… well his wRC+ was better than his uniform number, but that’s because he switched his number from 91 to 18.
He looks old in the photo
he is old
Per Kevin Henry of the Denver Gazzette, the Rockies were done paying for their portions of Arenado’s contract in 2025. They will not pay anything in 2026. He told me he checked with the Rockies PR directly. https://x.com/kgh23/status/2011164553854533835?s=20
I would not be surprised if the Rockies person had it wrong. About their own team and contracts. Like “oh fudge. yeah I guess I didnt read the whole contract before responding.” And they would use fudge. Not the right F word, because it’s the Rockies.
These Baumann headlines
The most interesting thing in the article is the fact that the Cardinals most expensive player is a pitcher who showed very little during his brief rental by the Red Sox in 2025, and he is getting more than twice as much as the next player. All things considered it is shocking to see the Cardinals, a great franchise for as long as the game has been played, fall on such a bleak period.
It is, but as a fan I’m more excited this year than last. We need a reset. The only thing that worries me is will ownership go back to the 170 million plus (and adjust fir inflation) payrolls when the time is right, maybe as soon as next year but certainly by 2029. If they will, fine, I don’t care about low payroll for a year or two. If they don’t and we become the reds….well that’s bad.
Eh is it really such a bleak period? They had a .480 winning percentage last year.
They’re tearing it down now to try to reset and have a clear direction. They won’t be good in 2026 but they have a strong farm system, some good young players and plenty of room to add payroll when the time comes.
Things have been fine up to this point in St Louis but this team is going to really struggle to stop opposing offenses in 2026.
The only thing that sucks abt the Cardinals’ fall is sperts fans are convinced losing is future winning or whatever and ownership will Do the Right Thing at the Right Time after you just told them a dollar and a dream is plenty. It’s genuinely insane and absurd, all the more because this mess considers itself as the most advanced, smertest society both in the history of history and possible
I watched Cubs fans eat this trash up not just once but twice spanning a decade. What we got is 2016 sandwiched between just an all out siege: draft cap; IFA cap, Luxury (we don’t even question this rhetoric lol, it truly is stunning the depths of this, what is accepted) cap, a stronger NCAA, the death of MiLB, increased illiteracy, always more media consolidation*, rampant gambling, massive jumps in player debut age (24, thank you Laurila!), ticket prices, privatized public funds, public lands, and franchise valuations, lower real wages, on and on and on lol…Absolute clownshow
*Become a FanGraphs member if you can pls
Actually, the Cardinal’s most expensive player this year is Sonny Gray. They are paying $20M for him to play for Boston!
Solid fit giving them some interesting depth. Whatever lightens the load for that sick, sick, just outstanding MIF of Perdomo and Marte
With this trade, Brendan Donovan is now the elder statesman of the Cardinals at 29 years old and has 4.000 service years. Nootbaar is the other elder statesman at over half a year younger and the only other position player with more than 4 years of service time at 4.076.
Donovan could be gone soon as well. Teams always talk about veteran leadership and the team has hardly has that if Donovan and Noot count. I would expect them to sign some type of FA to satisfy that RH OF role they want. That OF may not be good even, but I would assume they pick a guy who has shown clubhouse leadership skills.
Cheese, even a Fangraphs writer missed that Arenado was playing hurt for an entire month last season! His bat is actually still decent now that he’s healthy again. See here, for example: https://www.mlb.com/news/nolan-arenado-to-begin-rehab-assignment-for-shoulder-injury Was there some kind of conspiracy to limit that news to St. Louis as much as possible in order to lower his trade value?
Anyway, congrats Diamondbacks, you just got one heck of a bargain. As for the Cardinals, at least they got someone in return and cleared up their infield logjam.
He didn’t miss it, it just isn’t really relevant. Arenado hasn’t been hitting for a lot longer than his shoulder’s been hurt.
Arbitrary end points but over his last 13 months in MLB he has a WRC+ above league average 4 times, 90 or above 5 times and below 90 4 times.
Even the months above league averages have mostly been slightly above
July 2024 109
Aug 2024 126
April 2025 107
June 2025 103
Since August 2023 he has a 91 WRC+ and sure you can say it is all because of injuries but a guy who will be 35 early next season and has been either below average as a hitter or hurt for most of the last 2+ seasons isn’t someone who is going to have much value
So, Arenado will be drawing huge chunks of salary from Colorado AND St. Louis to play for Arizona? Good lord.
“As an aside, three different teams are going to pay Arenado at least $5 million this coming season, which has to be some kind of record.”
It may tie a record, but fairly sure it’s happened before (especially if we think about the absolute $ amount in inflation-adjusted terms).
Matt Kemp, in the middle of his 8 year/$160 million contract that ran from 2012 to 2019, was traded twice along with cash considerations: Dodgers to Padres in December 2014, Padres to Braves in July 2016.
If we include deferred money that’s being paid to a player from an earlier contract, Scherzer, after his mid-season trade in 2023, had a current contract with the cost split between 2 teams (Rangers and Mets) and was also receiving significant deferred money from the Nationals.