The Cardinals Are Having a Fire Sale. Here’s Who They Shipped Out.

2023 has been a rough year for the St. Louis Cardinals. They’re used to living in the NL Central penthouse, looking askance at whatever team happens to battle them for supremacy in a given season. Sometimes they lose those battles – the Cubs put together a nice run in the mid-2010s, the Reds had their time in the sun before that, and the Brewers have been a thorn in St. Louis’ side in recent years. But this kind of collapse – 47-60 and last place in the division – is unheard of.

The silver lining? The Cardinals had a ton of expiring contracts coming into the season, which means they have a ton of players to trade. With the deadline quickly approaching, they’re starting to turn those players into prospects. In two deals on Sunday, the Cardinals sent out Jordan Montgomery, Jordan Hicks, and Chris Stratton. Montgomery and Stratton are headed to the Rangers; meanwhile, better hope Hicks has a passport, because he’s now a Blue Jay. Eric Longenhagen is covering the prospects who are coming back to the Gateway City in a separate piece. Here, I’m just going to focus on how these three fit with their new teams, and the Cardinals’ general strategy from here on out.

Let’s start with the Rangers. This one is pretty straightforward: Montgomery slots into a hilariously deep Texas rotation. After acquiring Max Scherzer on Saturday, their playoff rotation looked solid. Now it looks even better. Scherzer and Nathan Eovaldi (health permitting) are an above-average top duo, Montgomery is overqualified as a third starter, and after him there’s a whole grab bag of guys I wouldn’t feel either great or terrible about as my last playoff starter. Dane Dunning, Jon Gray, Andrew Heaney, and Martín Pérez are all cromulent options, and the three who don’t draw a rotation assignment might play up out of the bullpen.

Montgomery is a cut above that foursome, and that’s very important for the Rangers. He’ll help in the regular season, of course, and give them tons of redundancy in case of injury. But a strong top three is really important given that we think they’re basically a coin flip to win the division – finish behind the Astros and a three game playoff series awaits. Montgomery makes that series slightly less likely to come up in the first place, and he’s a meaningful upgrade as the third starter in the Wild Card round should that unfortunate circumstance come to pass.

Stratton is essentially a throw-in, but he’s a valuable one for a Texas bullpen that was looking thin at the bottom. Grant Anderson, Yerry Rodríguez, Spencer Howard, and John King (dealt in this trade) were all middle inning sieves, turning small leads into small deficits and small deficits into big ones. Stratton is hardly a closer, but he’s a reasonable middle reliever. He might get pushed down the pecking order when some of the team’s starters head bullpenward in the playoffs. Before then, though, he’ll give the Rangers a marginal upgrade over what they had before every time he enters a game, and that kind of thing matters in tight divisional races.

The Rangers didn’t part with any current major leaguers – King pitched for the big club this year, but he’d been optioned to Triple-A. Again, Eric is covering who Texas sent out in greater depth, including infielder Thomas Saggese, but Tekoah Roby, a Top 100 prospect, is the main name worth knowing. This trade is about winning this year without sacrificing too much from the immediate future. Yes, Roby could make the bigs next season, but Texas has a ton of pitching depth, what with all those names bouncing around as potential fourth starters and all. The team’s best players are mostly in their prime years right now, so that plan makes sense to me. Giving up Roby isn’t costless, but it’s just a logical extension of the thinking that led to trading Luisangel Acuña to get Scherzer.

On to the next trade: Toronto already has a fairly good bullpen. Their worst pitcher at the moment is probably Génesis Cabrera, who the team recently acquired from St. Louis in a separate trade. After that, maybe it’s Nate Pearson or Trevor Richards, neither of whom are bad options as lower-tier bullpen arms. What Toronto is missing is a true lockdown type at the top with Jordan Romano on the IL.

That makes Hicks a perfect fit north of the border. He has ludicrous stuff; his 103 mph fastball pairs quite nicely with a nasty sweeping slider that he throws in the upper 80s. The fact that he throws a sinker instead of a riding four-seamer means he’s always going to allow a decent number of balls in play, and he’s always struggled with command, but the bottom line is this: no one wants to face Jordan Hicks in a big spot. He was probably the best reliever on the market after David Robertson got dealt.

When Romano returns, the Blue Jays will have a luxury item, a closer-level reliever doing setup work. That’s always nice in the playoffs, when closing the door with a small lead is important. More importantly, though, the Blue Jays need a solid bullpen right now. They’re in a tenuous position, clinging to the third Wild Card slot with four teams within five games of them. They can think about the playoffs after they make the playoffs; they’re in survival mode.

Like the Rangers, the Blue Jays didn’t sacrifice anything from their 2023 plans to acquire Hicks. That makes sense – what would the Cardinals want with those guys anyway? Toronto didn’t give up anyone with as much chance of being an impact player as Texas did in Roby, but both Sem Robberse and Adam Kloffenstein look like potential back-end starters, and the current plan in St. Louis for a 2024 rotation is Miles Mikolas, Steven Matz, and cardboard cutouts of Fredbird. A few bulk arms are just what the Cardinals are interested in.

That brings us back to where we started: St. Louis. These deals are part of a pretty obvious strategy for the Cardinals. I like to call it Operation Get Pitching Now. The highlights of both of these trade returns were starters to rebuild both their thin major league ranks and their uninspiring prospect pipeline. They’ve lagged behind the rest of baseball in prioritizing strikeout stuff and leaning into pitcher development, and this is the inevitable consequence. John Mozeliak specifically mentioned that the team prioritized adding pitchers with high whiff rates in these deals, in fact.

There are likely more arms coming in soon. Jack Flaherty is as good as gone. Paul DeJong is probably still going to move. Tyler O’Neill will be next if Dylan Carlson isn’t. Giovanny Gallegos would be well-served to keep an extra few changes of clothes in his road trip bag. St. Louis came into 2023 expecting to make the playoffs, which means they have a ton of players that playoff teams want. They’re going to turn a lot of those guys into pitchers so they can kick off 2024 doing the same thing they do every season: try to take over the world NL Central.