The good news for the St. Louis Cardinals is that they are in the midst of a four-game winning streak. Yes, the New York Mets have been disappointing and the Washington Nationals have been straight up bad, but this is the kind of progress that a baseball team which entered 2023 was division title aspirations needs to be capable of showing. The bad news is that, per FanGraphs, the Cardinals still find themselves with a less than one-in-six shot of cracking the postseason field. The Milwaukee Brewers are nearly 50/50 to win the National League Central, and both the Chicago Cubs and the current first-place Cincinnati Reds are projected as slightly more likely to win the division than the Cardinals.

Now, as in the afternoon of June 21, is not the time for the St. Louis Cardinals to sell–although any player’s value is projected to decrease between now and the trade deadline, simply by virtue of being unavailable for the games between, the next month-plus will allow potential buyers to solidify their own wish lists and allow the Cardinals to weigh exactly how desperate of sellers they want to be.

An interesting quirk of Cardinals fandom is that, pretty much since the arrival of Walt Jocketty in 1996, the organization have never really been sellers. The Cardinals will occasionally make deadline deals with no discernible “buyer” or “seller” (such as last year’s Harrison Bader for Jordan Montgomery flip with the New York Yankees), but aside from the 2018 trade of Tommy Pham that as time goes on looks more and more like it may have been a trade based on clubhouse disharmony rather than a true sell-off, the Cardinals have largely been buyers, even if sometimes too incrementally for many fans’ liking. Even a 1997 team which was five games under .500 traded a reliever and prospects for a two-month rental in first baseman Mark McGwire, though subsequent team actions made this trade look a lot more sensible than if an equivalent move happened in 2023.

If the Cardinals find themselves in a similar position to now in a month, with the club’s postseason dreams fleeting, selling the team’s pending free agents would be the sensible move. Jack Flaherty, Jordan Hicks, and Chris Stratton are all pending free agents at the end of the season, and even if the club maintained some hope of re-signing some or all of these players, there is no rule saying that doing so after a 2-3 month rental period cannot happen (in 2016, the New York Yankees sent 2-3 months of Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs for Gleyber Torres, worth 12.5 Wins Above Replacement over his career as a Yankees middle infielder, and then re-signed Chapman in the off-season anyway, for one example). Jordan Montgomery also fits this criteria, though given his reasonable case for a draft pick-yielding qualifying offer, there is a solid floor on what the Cardinals should be willing to accept for him beyond “whatever the best you can get is”. This is the easy part. The real questions come with those who will not be imminent free agents, those who could reasonably be part of the next championship St. Louis Cardinals team. And following the 2024 season, Paul Goldschmidt will be a free agent.

The trade which brought Paul Goldschmidt to St. Louis has gone through several life cycles in terms of re-appraisal. In 2019, the lone season for which the Cardinals were tangibly acquiring Goldschmidt in the first place, the first baseman had the worst full season of his MLB career–to be clear, a 117 wRC+ and 2.6 WAR is still an objectively above-average player, but the case could easily be made that the Cardinals would have been best off in a scenario where they never make the trade. In 2019, Luke Weaver and Carson Kelly were both terrific for the Arizona Diamondbacks, and had Goldschmidt had a similarly good-not-great 2019 for the Diamondbacks, the Cardinals could have signed Paul Goldschmidt for less than the five years and $130 million for which he was actually signed (granted, they likely would have forfeited the first-round draft pick that turned into Jordan Walker, but who knows how long Walker lasts and if the Cardinals’ perception of him was higher than other teams–look, this hypothetical gets real complicated real quickly and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the current situation at hand, so I’ll move on).

Even if the Cardinals could have probably paid less than they did for Paul Goldschmidt in hindsight, it’s impossible to argue that the contract has not paid off for the team. Adjusting for the shortened 2020 season and his docked pay for games missed in Toronto in 2022 (I know some of you will think this is a potshot, but it impacts how much money he made by over $300,000, so it’s not nothing), Goldschmidt will earn approximately $113.3 million as a Cardinal since 2020, and by the math of FanGraphs, his open-market value has been $136.1 million, and that’s with another year-and-a-half left on the contract. Goldschmidt’s 2022 numbers were probably a bit outlandish for what should be expected of late-career Paul Goldschmidt, but in 2023, his 143 wRC+ makes a lot of sense. Good power, good walk rate–simply a really good heart of the order hitter. The kind of player that would make a ton of sense for a contender.

That kind of player would also make sense for a 2024 contender, which the Cardinals hope to be, but if the Cardinals perceive that Paul Goldschmidt will have championship contender value for them in 2024 alone, that’s less than for teams who see themselves as contenders for 2023 and 2024. Last week, MLB.com’s Will Leitch made the case for trading Paul Goldschmidt at the deadline, detailing the reasons that dealing the veteran could make sense. Leitch notes that although Paul Goldschmidt is obviously the best first baseman on the current Cardinals roster, the Cardinals arguably have their first baseman of the future in Jordan Walker (though I would also note Nolan Gorman, despite improvements at second base, is a candidate here as well). Consider how well Jordan Walker has hit lately, consider the bump that Gorman (a well-regarded but not Walker-level prospect) experienced in his sophomore season, and consider that Paul Goldschmidt will turn 37 years old during the 2024 season–would you be shocked if Jordan Walker was a straight-up better player than Paul Goldschmidt next year?

This is somewhat beside the point, as Goldschmidt vs. Walker isn’t an either/or debate–the Cardinals can easily (and probably will) have both players in 2024. But if Paul Goldschmidt could provide more value to another team than he would to the Cardinals, what is received in return may be worth it for St. Louis–it’s not as though Paul Goldschmidt, in this scenario, would be given away for free. There are a surprising number of good teams receiving little to no production out of the first base position. Out of the seven teams who have received the least production as scored by FanGraphs WAR at first base, all are probably nonstarters: three (Detroit, Colorado, Washington) aren’t even cursory playoff threats, three are divisional opponents (Cincinnati, Milwaukee, the Chicago Cubs; while I have long rejected the opposition to intra-division trading, it is a likely reality of life, particularly when Paul Goldschmidt could conceivably be a thorn in the Cardinals’ side during a viable 2024 season), and the Houston Astros just spent a bunch of money on José Abreu, and while he has been awful, relegating him to the bench isn’t likely in the cards.

On the slightly better at first base side but still looking for improvement come a handful of more likely candidates. I will now look at Baseball Trade Values dot com, an extremely flawed method of potential trade evaluation, to least present an idea of what kind of prospect return could be garnered for Paul Goldschmidt.

San Diego Padres: Money is no object to the Padres, since the concept of market size as a limiting factor in budgets is largely a myth, and they could use an upgrade at first base. Even if I suspect tacos are too spicy for Goldschmidt, on the field, San Diego makes a ton of sense as both team and player chase their first World Series title. All other things being equal, the Cardinals are likely to prefer pitching prospects, so I am skipping past outfield prospect Samuel Zavala in favor of Adam Mazur and Robby Snelling. Mazur, a 22 year-old who was selected 53rd overall in 2022, has a 1.71 ERA in high-A this season. Snelling, selected 14 spots earlier in 2022, is just 19, but has shown promise with a 1.74 ERA in 10 starts with the single-A Lake Elsinore Storm.

Philadelphia Phillies: With Rhys Hoskins injured, the defending pennant champions could use another big bat. To which I submit the prospect pair of Griff McGarry and Johan Rojas. McGarry entered 2023 as the #51 prospect in baseball, per Baseball Prospectus, and although he has battled control issues in 2023, he is still an intriguing prospect. Rojas is an outfielder, which departs the directive of acquiring pitchers, but given that the team’s best prospect is moving to first base in this scenario, another outfielder could be nice–Johan Rojas, who is on the Phillies’ 40-man roster, has a .861 OPS in 285 plate appearances in AA as a 22 year-old who can play center field. That’s not nothing.

Baltimore Orioles: After years in the basement, the Baltimore Orioles are emerging as an actual contender with a young core that could use a veteran star. Unfortunately, the Orioles have a position player-laden prospect core, so it may not line up perfectly with the Cardinals’ aspirations, but Heston Kjerstad and Cade Povich is a pretty appealing pairing. Kjerstad, an outfielder, is the headliner and probably the prospect listed in any of these trades whose name you are most likely to know, as he was the #2 overall pick of the 2020 draft. His prospect status has fallen some, but MLB did rank him at #80 entering this season, and the 24 year-old had a .960 OPS in AA this season before being promoted to AAA, where he has a 1.025 OPS, granted in only 48 plate appearances. Povich is a pitcher, and although the 23 year-old may lack the excitement of Kjerstad, he is the #2 pitching prospect in the Orioles organization and ranks #1 among those who have yet to make their MLB debuts.

These are not fool-proof estimations of return packages, but they may cause some humility as to what the Cardinals would be in line to acquire if they were to deal Goldschmidt. Jackson Holliday, for instance, would not realistically be on the table from the Orioles. The return package for Goldschmidt, who is older, more expensive, and has more remaining team control than Juan Soto, is not going to be some absolute smash. It could be nice–in and of itself, I think having Heston Kjerstad would be neat. But is it worth making the team worse in 2024? Might it be more satisfying to keep watching Goldschmidt in 2023, make another run in 2024, and then either re-sign him for 2025 or offer him the qualifying offer and recoup a prospect that way?

I would argue that this is probably the case. I’m not saying that Paul Goldschmidt should be off the table, though–maybe a team would be willing to sell the farm for Paul Goldschmidt, and the Cardinals should keep an open mind. But ultimately, selling him would not likely be an organizational-changing move in the way that the Washington Nationals retooled their farm system in flipping Soto last season.