Realistically, there were three realistic options for the St. Louis Cardinals at the 2023 trade deadline.

1. Delusion: Convince themselves that they had a chance to make serious postseason noise in 2023 and either acquire new talent or maintain the status quo.
2. The bare minimum: Sell off pending free agents at the last possible moment for whatever salvage value can be attained.
3. The full re-tooling: Sell off cost-controlled talent and load up future major contributors to the 2024 team and beyond.

Saying that the Cardinals did “the bare minimum” sounds like an insult, though this was undeniably the route they took. But the further implication of the phrase is that the St. Louis Cardinals are procrastinating, when in reality the safe route may be the coherent one.

One major caveat of any analysis of the 2023 St. Louis Cardinals’ in-season transactions is that their actions were the result of their own previous actions; while John Mozeliak has occasionally sounded extremely willing to deflect criticism by proclaiming the team’s bad luck, there is also a certain Tim Robinson In A Hot Dog Costume-esque feeling to regarding the team’s insufficient starting pitching as an unpredictable problem and that he’s just trying to find the guy who did this. The previously used term of “salvage value” is apropos because it is correctly perceiving the returns that the St. Louis Cardinals received on four pending free agents and one player with only team options remaining on his contract as consolation prizes.

But a handful of prospects in the teens or so of their own organization’s prospect list is still better than nothing–it just isn’t an organizational victory on par with actual postseason success. Especially in the cases of the Jordan Hicks and Paul DeJong trades, both of which involved trading a player that most assumed would eventually need to simply be cut, the returns were essentially found money, so any return felt like a massive victory. In the cases of Jordan Montgomery and Jack Flaherty, there is more requisite scrutiny, to some extent because neither player felt on the Cardinals’ chopping block but more relevantly because there was some realistic chance of obtaining a draft pick as compensation for them in the off-season, had the Cardinals offering them a qualifying offer and it been declined.

The only pending free agent remaining on the St. Louis Cardinals now is Drew VerHagen, a player for whom there was almost certainly no discernible trade market. Simply running out the clock with him seems like a reasonable thing to do if the salvage value were effectively zero. As for the players that some are surprised to see remaining on the Cardinals, the big name is Tyler O’Neill. O’Neill, a free agent after the 2024 season, has seemed like the odd man out in the crowded outfield. But given his recent health concerns, it’s also reasonable to assume that they would be selling very low on O’Neill–there is a logic, if there are no compelling offers, to running O’Neill out just about every day for the rest of the season, either to let him establish himself in the team’s 2024 rotation or, perhaps more likely, to show him off to potential suitors.

Dylan Carlson’s name was trotted out late in the day on Tuesday, often tied to the New York Yankees, but this would be another case of selling seemingly low. Carlson still has three years of salary arbitration remaining; entertaining a trade given the outfield crowd makes complete sense, but it doesn’t make any particular sense to force some sort of trade for its own sake. And while Brendan Donovan was occasionally mentioned, that in the waning minutes before the trade deadline it was revealed that he will miss the remainder of the 2023 season recovering from surgery demonstrates why this wouldn’t make sense at the trade deadline–if absolutely nothing else, the wise play for the Cardinals would be to wait until the offseason when there are more suitors (teams rarely “buy” at the deadline when they aren’t in immediate playoff contention, even if the player is under contract beyond the end of that season). On some level, shopping Donovan does make some sense–he’s played well beyond expectations anyone had for him prior to the 2022 season, and the Cardinals seem to have a deep list of potential middle infielders coming up which makes Donovan expendable for the right return–but doing so when he needs surgery is a recipe for not getting a fair return.

Ultimately, I think the Cardinals did a good job at the deadline, but I don’t want to give them too much credit since they were put in a position to look relatively good by their own previous mistakes. But I also want to evaluate each move on its own merits rather than re-litigating their previous sins, and from July 30 through August 1, I do believe the Cardinals made some good moves.