1997 really wasn’t that long ago. We had cable television and we almost had Dan McLaughlin broadcasting baseball games on it. This isn’t ancient history. But to revisit the trade which brought Mark McGwire to the St. Louis Cardinals on July 31, 1997 feels as though it would require some competence in Olde English to comprehend. There are trades in the free agency era that are as crazy as the McGwire one, but I would argue that none are more crazy.

The style of trade which brought McGwire to St. Louis would become familiar to Cardinals fans in the subsequent years. In the broad sense, this was what happened when the Cardinals brought Jim Edmonds to St. Louis in 2000, Scott Rolen to the Cardinals in 2002, and in the post-Walt Jocketty years, Matt Holliday in 2009 and Jason Heyward in 2014 during the John Mozeliak era. In a trade very much of the same genre but in reverse for the Cardinals, there was the trade which sent J.D. Drew and Eli Marrero to the Atlanta Braves for Ray King, Jason Marquis, and a young pitching prospect named Adam Wainwright.

The format was simple–a team with little to no hope (or aspiration) to re-sign a marquee player trades the player within a year of his reaching free agency in order to receive a player, or more often players, with less splashy names but with more associated team control. In the cases of Jim Edmonds, acquired during Spring Training, and Scott Rolen and Matt Holliday, acquired just shy of the trade deadline, the Cardinals also gained the benefit of developing a positive relationship with the players, all of whom would later sign long-term contracts in St. Louis. But even in the case of Jason Heyward, who put up one really good season with the Cardinals but subsequently signed as a free agent with the Chicago Cubs, both sides essentially got what they wanted out of the trade–the Cardinals acquired Heyward, who was arguably the most valuable player on a 100-win team that nevertheless would need additional firepower to withstand the 98-win Pittsburgh Pirates and the 97-win Cubs for the NL Central crown, while the Braves acquired Shelby Miller, a low-cost pitcher for their rebuilding years whom they eventually parlayed into one of the great swindles in recent memory, flipping the pitcher to the Arizona Diamondbacks for a package which included future All-Star shortstop Dansby Swanson and Gold Glove center fielder Ender Inciarte.

An area on which I have devoted entirely too much attention as a Cardinals writer is critiquing the way that we evaluate the Edmonds, Rolen, and Holliday trades. In the cases of Edmonds and Rolen, the trades were mutually beneficial–the Anaheim Angels acquired Adam Kennedy, a future starter on their World Series-winning team in 2002, and the Philadelphia Phillies acquired Plácido Polanco, a versatile infielder who had one of the quietest Hall of Very Good careers in baseball history. And if you count only the contributions of those players for the seasons in which the Cardinals had team control, all three trades are arguably still wins for the Cardinals–each had a fantastic debut season in St. Louis for a playoff team–but they are no longer the absurd swindles that garner comparisons to Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio.

But in 1997, the St. Louis Cardinals were not trying to get over the hump–they were trying to hold on for dear life–when the Cardinals finalized the trade which brought Mark McGwire into the organization, they sat at a mediocre 51-55, seven games behind the Houston Astros for the National League Central crown. For a so-so team to be buyers at the trade deadline is not without recent precedent–although a late-season surge would obscure this fact, when the Texas Rangers traded for Cole Hamels at the 2015 deadline, they too were below .500–but typically the buyers are also keeping an eye on the future. In some ways, you can think of this as a higher-effort version of the Cardinals (likely) retaining Paul Goldschmidt–no, they probably won’t need him for 2023, but they’re going to really want him in 2024, so it makes sense for the team to maintain control over what they already have.

In the case of McGwire, however, the first baseman was a pure rental. McGwire, who had spent his entire professional career in northern California and was born, raised, and still lived in southern California, was set to become a free agent after the 1997 season, and the standard rumors at the time were that he would pursue a contract with one of the teams located in southern California–the Dodgers, the Angels, or perhaps the San Diego Padres. The Cardinals, of course, would not qualify by any stretch of the imagination, though they did at least have Tony LaRussa, McGwire’s long-time manager with the Oakland Athletics, as a potentially seductive force for retaining McGwire’s services.

But this was hardly a guarantee, and even if it were, who’s to say that the Cardinals could not simply wait until the conclusion of their going-nowhere season before throwing a boatload of money at him in the off-season? There isn’t a super-clean comparison for Mark McGwire in the 2023 market, since Shohei Ohtani is such a singularly valuable player, but he was probably as close as it came at the time in terms of pure value. Imagine what a stunning development it would be if looks through 2023 standings, picks out a team which isn’t absolutely terrible but which is likely running out of time to make serious playoff noise this year the St. Louis Cardinals traded for Shohei Ohtani–for as much as fans groan about the club’s small-c conservative approach to free agency, it is materially more likely that the Cardinals would break the bank for Ohtani in the fall than to trade the meaningful prospect capital it would require to acquire him for a near-impossible postseason run.

The problem with retrospective analyses of trades involving prospects is that we tend to judge the prospects by what they became and not by the range of outcomes they had when they were traded. For instance, Masyn Winn’s average outcome is probably, like, competent utility infielder/useful-if-uninspiring starter. His ceiling is of a superstar–a defensive whiz whose offense is improving and could become the new Francisco Lindor. His floor is somebody who, if he makes the Major Leagues, his employers might regret that he did. If Winn were to be traded tomorrow, how that trade is evaluated is dependent on what Winn becomes, even though the savviest industry insiders don’t know for certain what Winn will become.

The players traded for Mark McGwire were T.J. Mathews, Eric Ludwick, and Blake Stein, three players who are best known today simply for being a part of this trade. But Mathews, a Metro East native who was initially drafted by the Oakland Athletics out of St. Louis Community College-Meramec, had been a really good relief pitcher for the Cardinals–in his first two seasons, Mathews had a 2.62 ERA. He wasn’t quite Ryan Helsley, but he was arguably Andre Pallante, which isn’t nothing, particularly when the player being pursued is only under contract for two more months. Eric Ludwick, the older brother of future (better) Cardinal Ryan Ludwick, had been less successful in his cameos with the Cardinals, but was graded as the 13th best pitching prospect in baseball (check out this recap for a real nostalgia trip). And Blake Stein, who at 23 was the young gun of the trade, spent a few years as a competent sixth/seventh starter type and was part of a trade which brought Kevin Appier to the Oakland Athletics. None of these guys were super-prospects, and none of them turned into amazing big leaguers, but in the moment, all three of them likely had more value to the organization than Zac Gallen had when he was included in the Marcell Ozuna trade.

The three prospects traded for McGwire were so mediocre post-trade that even if McGwire hadn’t re-upped with the Cardinals, the general joy of how well he performed individually in 1997 was arguably more important for the organization than some depth relievers. But this trade is simply inconceivable by modern standards. My point isn’t even that Walt Jocketty was right and that all the Analytics Nerds (TM) are wrong and need to stop looking at spreadsheets and watch the actual games (side note: Mark McGwire is one of the more agreed-upon by every camp players imaginable). I’m also not trying to say the inverse–that this trade was stupid and that Jocketty got lucky. I prefer to just evaluate this trade as a weird note in Cardinals and trade deadline history, a trade that you cannot say didn’t work but will likely remain unprecedented for the rest of time.