I debated back and forth over whether to make this an actual post, because frankly I don’t care much about explaining most of these answers, but I had enough to say on enough players that I figured I would go with it. Obviously it goes without saying that, say, I don’t think the guy who is ranked #40 here is going to get traded, but also I don’t think merely suggesting a player’s tradability is some sort of insult. Frankly, I think most of the guys near the top of this list want to be traded, not because they hate the Cardinals nor St. Louis nor St. Louis Cardinals fans but because they’re about to be free agents so they might as well run out the clock on their pre-free agency years with a good team rather than a team that probably isn’t going to make the playoffs.

So let’s start with #40.

40. Adam Wainwright: Adam Wainwright doesn’t make any particular sense for a contending team, and sending him away makes even less sense for the Cardinals. Even if Adam Wainwright, who can veto a trade if he so chooses, wanted to be traded, and even if there was a team that thought he could bounce back to, say, middle-of-the-rotation quality, is the marginal prospect the Cardinals could get for him worth the money they’ll make over the Adam Wainwright Retirement Tour?

39. Nolan Arenado: I changed my mind from a week and a half ago, but it still seems really far-fetched.

38. Miles Mikolas: Were it not for the extension he signed last off-season, Mikolas would be a prime trade candidate, but both team and player seem interested in keeping him around, um, at least before his extension kicks in.

37. Jordan Walker: It would be fairly ridiculous to trade Jordan Walker at a point where his value is probably diminished by his poor defensive statistics, but if his defense is truly this bad, he’s probably going to be move to first base or designated hitter and be a good player under team control. I don’t think he’s “off the table” in the sense that they would never under any circumstances trade Jordan Walker, but it would take a lot, and the nature of trade that would be required is more of an off-season thing.

36. Lars Nootbaar: There’s an outfield logjam which is why he ranks as highly as he does here, but everyone associated with the organization seems to adore him. Like with Walker, I don’t think, like, they’d decline Corbin Carroll for him, but also, the Arizona Diamondbacks aren’t going to do that.

35. Brendan Donovan: He’s cost-controlled and plays a bunch of positions and is scrappy. No way.

34. Giovanny Gallegos: I think Gallegos is a decent step up from Donovan in terms of possibility, and teams love to add relievers at the deadline, but he’s still under contract for another year (potentially two–2025 is a team option) and the Cardinals would be selling quite low on their veteran.

33. Connor Thomas: There’s gonna be a lot of guys who are essentially minor league depth coming up. Thomas is a little bit more of a prospect than some so I put him as less tradeable, because a contender has no pressing need for him, but it’s all fairly indistinguishable. Get ready for some non-descriptions.

32. Nolan Gorman: It would take a major offer but if the Cardinals aren’t sure Gorman has a position or aren’t sure of his long-term strikeout concerns, this puts him as at least more likely to go than a Jordan Walker.

31. Kyle Leahy

30. Alec Burleson: Again, outfield logjam, but the team seems to like Burleson more than most, and his batted ball stats suggest they’d be selling a bit low on a potentially dangerous slugger.

29. James Naile: Like Kyle Leahy but A Local Kid.

28. Richie Palacios: So, honest truth here–this is the one player on here I straight up had never heard of. Sometimes teams do boring trades, like trade a guy for cash considerations or whatever, and I’m banking on that/a chorus of people yelling at the Cardinals for being a cheap after this.

27. Andre Pallante: This would make more sense if he didn’t have so much club control left.

26. Willson Contreras: The Cardinals have a precarious catching scenario starting next season, when Iván Herrera will be out of minor league options, so I assume someone will be gone by the start of 2024. And despite Bob Nightengale claiming Contreras was on the market, I still think there’s at least some chance that it happens, though I don’t think it’s super likely.

25. Tommy Edman: He’s extremely useful for pretty much any team, and this is my logic here–I think Edman’s trade value is probably a lot higher than most would think, and while losing him would be a problem of sorts, it arguably isn’t a catastrophic one.

24. Guillermo Zuñiga: He throws really hard and I could see him being the kind of guy who, like, gets traded for future considerations and then everyone gets furious when he throws 100 MPH for the Rays in the playoffs.

23. Matthew Liberatore: It’s starting to become a question–an open question–whether this is just kind of what Matthew Liberatore is–a swingman type who is hardly bad but isn’t going to necessarily pencil into a rotation slot. But I lean towards “this team can’t afford to trade off what pitching depth they have”.

22. Moisés Gómez: I just don’t see a ton of demand for a sub-.800 Memphis OPS outfielder who can’t get a sniff of the big league roster. But also I don’t see the Cardinals being especially afraid to move him for some guy to open up a 40-man spot.

21. Luken Baker: A man who, due to the Cardinals’ preponderance of first base options, I assume will eventually get traded. Probably not now, but hey, it’s middle of the pack.

20. Steven Matz: The Mike Leake vibes are undeniable. I am fully prepared to be annoyed when the Cardinals trade him and eat half the contract for some team’s 24th best prospect.

19. Zack Thompson: Pretty much the same description as Matthew Liberatore but with a little less prospect pedigree.

18. Paul Goldschmidt: I am absolutely not as adamant about this one as an impossibility as many–it would make sense if Goldschmidt, who has a full no-trade clause, would want to go to an immediate contender, and it would make sense for the Cardinals to want to clear out a position where a Jordan Walker could easily slot in long-term if a big prospect haul could come back. I don’t think it’s happening–I don’t think eighteen Cardinals are getting moved at the deadline. But it’s not out of the question.

17. José Fermín: You may be asking yourself why I would put a name as big as Paul Goldschmidt between José Fermín and Luken Baker, two guys with functionally the same role in the Cardinals–young but expendable Memphis shuttle guys. And the answer is because basically every spot on this list outside like the top five is irrelevant.

16. Dylan Carlson: There’s a logjam and the Cardinals seem to have soured on Dylan Carlson. That said, they’d be selling a bit low and there probably isn’t much harm in waiting until the off-season, where more teams would be interested in a cost-controlled guy who can play all three outfield positions. Then again, the last time the Cardinals had a two-months-before-arb former top prospect in the outfield who was surprisingly supplanted in the team’s future by a much less heralded lefty major college player, they traded him and they won the World Series.

15. Jake Woodford: He is to Zack Thompson what Thompson is to Matthew Liberatore–a man without a defined role of any real sort. The Cardinals are running out of time on Woodford and if some decent team thinks he could figure into their bullpen, now might be as good of a time as any to deal him for whatever they can get.

14. Iván Herrera: Like I said, catcher backlog, and Herrera, who played well in his last stint with the big club, would certainly garner the biggest potential return. That said, he doesn’t especially make sense right now–for a contending team, he’s probably a backup catcher, and what team is trading material assets for a backup catcher, even one who will be making the league minimum for a few more years?

13. Ryan Helsley: Note–in the process of me writing this, Helsley went to the 60-day IL, which I don’t think should make a major difference to his tradability. This is a pretty simple one–he’s a good reliever who makes real money, the kind of player contenders love to acquire and sellers love to no longer have to pay.

12. Taylor Motter: Look, if I had told you two days ago that Taylor Motter was traded two weeks ago to the Baltimore Orioles for a 17 year-old pitching prospect, you’d have believed me.

11. Juan Yepez: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again–I want the Cardinals to trade Juan Yepez for his own career advancement. He might not be a good enough hitter to play over Paul Goldschmidt but he’s a good enough hitter to play over a bunch of guys. It would be a classic off-season trade, hence it sits outside the top ten, but an eventual trade feels inevitable.

10. Andrew Knizner: A theory on why Herrera got demoted today–they want to sell Andrew Knizner, who to be fair has been better in 2023 than before (admittedly not a super high bar), and want to see if they can get something for him (unlike Herrera, whatever a contender would pay for a rental backup catcher probably is enough to get a deal done).

9. JoJo Romero: He’s a lefty reliever, a thing teams love with very few additional questions asked.

8. Drew VerHagen: He has been better than 2022 but not great in 2023, but he occasionally looks electric and the Cardinals are probably motivated sellers, as they wouldn’t want to cough up third year arbitration rates for VerHagen next year.

7. Dakota Hudson: He’s almost certainly going to be nontendered if he isn’t traded–most teams aren’t looking to give a guy who has spent almost all of 2023 in AAA a raise from a $2.65 million arb salary. But hey, his numbers are decent in the big leagues this year and some team may want to dream on the former first-round draft pick.

6. Paul DeJong: It’s absolutely wild that Paul DeJong played himself into “picking up his team option for 2024 wouldn’t be insane” territory. But the Cardinals can spare themselves of that decision right now by getting an okay prospect or two for the shortstop right now. This would be a rare sell-high for the Cardinals.

5. Tyler O’Neill: Until last weekend, I kind of forgot he was still around. He sure seems like the inevitable odd-man-out of odd-men-out. I just want to point out that Tyler O’Neill was originally a Seattle Mariners prospect and Jarred Kelenic just went to the IL. I’m just saying, you make a call.

4. Chris Stratton: Pending free agent. Get what you can get for him.

3. Jordan Montgomery: He and #2 are neck-and-neck, though I would say that the Cardinals are more likely to extend Jordan Montgomery and more likely to at least offer him the qualifying offer, which could make keeping him through the end of 2023 a reasonable long-term play.

2. Jack Flaherty: I’m not a believer in this whole “oh he hates it here” narrative–frankly, I find it annoying–but he probably wants to compete somewhere. He’s arguably a QO candidate as well, but there’s less certainty there, so for the Cardinals, it might make sense to cash in now.

1. Jordan Hicks: He isn’t getting a qualifying offer–almost no relievers do. And he’s having a good season–they’re going to end up getting something of actual value for a guy I was screaming to cut a couple months ago. This is a no-brainer decision for the Cardinals.