On one side stands the St. Louis Cardinals holding onto a center fielder who had come to the Majors and surpassed his level of hype tenfold but had gone through a recent spat of injuries and had just one more year after the current one of remaining club control. On another side stands a starting pitcher was a similar level of control to their position player, one who could fit the bill for a team lacking substantial star power in the rotation. And much as the Cardinals traded Harrison Bader near the 2022 trade deadline, the Cardinals have reportedly (per Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic) repeated themselves in sending Tommy Edman to the Los Angeles Dodgers as part of a three-team trade in which they will acquire Chicago White Sox starting pitcher Erick Fedde.

Two years ago, the Cardinals trading Tommy Edman for Erick Fedde would have been inconceivable. In his fourth season with the team, Edman was a top-ten player in the National League by Wins Above Replacement as a defending Gold Glove winner at second base, while Fedde was washing out of the Washington Nationals organization and heading to the Korean Baseball Organization to try to get his career back on track. Even last year, when Tommy Edman took a step back but was still a useful and frequent starter at second base, shortstop, and center fielder, Erick Fedde was still something of an unknown, producing for the NC Dinos but hardly a dependable MLB pitcher.

But everything…okay as I was typing this the Cardinals traded for Tommy Pham and what am I supposed to do just pretend this is a normal afternoon

Huh. Tommy Pham. Also of the Chicago White Sox. Surely this is a separate trade; it’s not that Tommy Pham is overflowing with value as a 35 year-old certified opponent-slapper, but he’s still got a slightly above-average bat and he still plays some center field but…further news breaks–this is part of the three-team trade and all of the prospects are still coming from the Dodgers. The Cardinals functionally traded Tommy Edman for Tommy Pham and Erick Fedde

My God. This is incredible.

I do want to be completely clear about something: I understand what the other sides are doing here. Tommy Edman is, when healthy, a terrific utility player. I think I’d prefer him in a vacuum in 2025 to Erick Fedde, even though Fedde has been straight-up great so far this season. There’s just more of a track record there. And the White Sox are getting some solid prospects for a handful of guys they weren’t going to have much use for anyway.

But Tommy Edman was increasingly expendable for the Cardinals. As a center fielder, he never had as much value as he did in the middle infield, and with the solidification of Brendan Donovan and Nolan Gorman as well as the ascension of Masyn Winn, Edman was seemingly biding his time until he reached free agency and hoped everybody remembered the things that made him a super valuable player. And to be clear, I love Tommy Edman–he always seemed like a super nice and smart guy and he was such a breath of fresh air when he came up to the Cardinals.

Were Edman traded for merely rotation filler, I would be a little bummed about this. But Erick Fedde has been a top-twenty pitcher in baseball in 2024 by FanGraphs WAR, and this is the WAR variant that looks less favorably at him (his 3.11 ERA adjusts to a 3.77 FIP, which is still really good!). The Cardinals’ starting rotation, which has been better than I expected this year, has depth, but aside from Sonny Gray (who has fallen off a bit over the last couple months), there hasn’t really been a high-end guy. Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn, Miles Mikolas, and now even Andre Pallante have been somewhere between promising and acceptable, but now, suddenly one of them will be without a spot in the rotation. But this is good! This is how a team in 2024 should build its rotation, with the knowledge that guys are getting hurt constantly and that it’s good to line up second options. Also, one of these guys can just go to the bullpen and that helps to improve that facet of the team.

And here’s the thing about Tommy Pham–he is extremely interesting. Forget “that’s not necessarily a good or bad thing”–it’s both. Tommy Pham is one of the most psychotically competitive athletes I have ever seen, both in games (his intensity is very much visible on the field) and when he’s slapping Joc Pederson over Fantasy Football. I don’t like everything about his get-down–while the Joc Pederson slap was darkly funny, especially since it’s not like Pederson got hurt, you should probably apologize for that, and I try not to spend too much time contemplating his now-private Twitter likes or his non-baseball Twitter follows–but these ultimately don’t matter in terms of a trade. By and large, his teammates seem to be appreciate Tommy Pham, and while he almost certainly will never recapture the magic of his initial run with the St. Louis Cardinals, he can absolutely fill a role for a Cardinals team that has desperately needed a right-handed center fielder.

The more I think about this trade, the more I love it. The more I consider it, the more the trade reminds me not of the Bader-Montgomery trade but of how when Sean Murphy got traded to the Atlanta Braves, the Milwaukee Brewers somehow got William Contreras for Esteury Ruiz. This trade certainly makes the Cardinals better in 2024 and the addition of Erick Fedde gives them some rotation certainty for 2025. What an afternoon.