It’s not the offseason the Cardinals planned, but Mozeliak say his priority is unchanged

This is not the offseason the St. Louis Cardinals envisioned, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak acknowledged Saturday at Busch Stadium, speaking from the podium on the first day of the team’s annual Winter Warm-Up.

WIth a plan to move on from third baseman Nolan Arenado in order to cut salary, that has not yet materialized. An agreed upon trade between the Cardinals and Houston Astros collapsed under the weight of Arenado’s no-trade clause, but that failure hasn’t yet reached the point of deviation from the path.

“I think priority one, two and three is still Nolan,” Mozeliak said.

And so the freeze persists.

“I was a little bit surprised,” he said, asked about Arenado’s decision to reject the Astros. “I think looking back at that, I think when [Kyle] Tucker was traded [to the Chicago Cubs], it was almost more like order of operation. Had we been a few days ahead of that, I think there would’ve been no…here we are. So, yeah, things happen.”

While he declined to provide specific figures regarding how deep the payroll may still need to be cut, Mozeliak did emphasize that his preference is not to trade from other areas of the roster with the pressure of spring training’s start bearing down as a soft deadline. Starters Erick Fedde and Steven Matz have drawn interest from around the league, and neither holds any trade protection.

Neither, however, would come with the financial relief the Cardinals are seeking by trading Arenado, and the challenges created by such a move are evidently viewed as more significant than the relief which would accompany shaking off their salaries – $7.5 million for Fedde and $12.5 million for Matz.

“Don’t really love that idea,” Mozeliak admitted. “We really feel like we have some depth in our rotation right now, so I really don’t want to start preparing tearing away from that, in terms of thinking about moving a position player to achieve some financial goals. That would be something we could consider as well, but we really don’t want to.”

The narrowly constructed path forward leaves the Cardinals operating under the same parameters they have been since the first week of October. Mozeliak acknowledged the strangeness of the winter, arriving at the ballpark to answer questions without having done anything to supplement the big league roster, but said that the team still plans to make some additions.

“[Trading Arenado] does give us some financial flexibility on perhaps adding to areas that we weren’t able to do so far,” he said. “So obviously bullpen, if we decided to look for a right handed bat with some thump, something like that. But it really just gives us some financial relief in a stressful environment right now.”

The complication in trading Arenado, on top of the financial obligation owed to him over the next three seasons, is the challenge of navigating his trade protection. Mozeliak said that the team hasn’t demanded any expansion of that list from Arenado or his agent, Joel Wolfe of Wasserman.

“It’s something we’ve talked about,” he said, “but not something we’ve demanded yet.”

Landing places for Arenado are not obvious. The Boston Red Sox remain perhaps at the top of the list, and will likely be so until and unless they make roster moves which foreclose that possibility. Third baseman Alex Bregman, formerly of the Astros, is still a free agent, and the market seemingly flows through him and his availability. Once he signs, the Cardinals then will have a clearer idea of which teams are still in need of a third baseman, and a market which has been quiet and slow might define itself.

“I would imagine the free agent market would be what’s slowing that down,” Mozeliak said when asked why there hadn’t yet been a deal for Arenado which came to fruition, referencing Bregman in all but name. “In a lot of ways, that’s sort of what I anticipated early on. Depending on where he goes, maybe the under bidders might have interest [in Arenado].”

There is of course still a scenario in which no trade is reached before position players are required to report to Jupiter in roughly a month and Arenado remains a Cardinal. Mozeliak said he hasn’t yet breached that possibility with Arenado – he shared that the two haven’t spoken directly since just before the holidays – but knows that is a conversation that is looming on the horizon.

“It really is something that he and I would have to discuss, if he would be open to that, if something were to arise,” Mozeliak said about the possibility of Arenado coming to camp as a Cardinal and pursuing trades throughout the spring.

“There’s the mental side of this too, right? He’s probably thinking, like, OK, if I have to come to camp, I want to start preparing for that, and maybe he wants to be committed to [staying in St. Louis] at that point. So I don’t want to speak for him at this point, because we have not discussed that. But clearly, as we get closer to Jupiter, that is something we will have to touch on.”