For most of his career with the St. Louis Cardinals, Paul Goldschmidt was boring (complimentary). He was the kind of consistent, professional hitting type first baseman whose solid, fundamental plate approach and appetite for plain hamburgers you could set your watch to. Over the last couple years, Paul Goldschmidt was boring (derogatory)–he wasn’t a bad player, per se, but he was utterly forgettable if it weren’t for the whole thing where he was literally the Most Valuable Player of the National League in two thousand and twenty-two, which is not that long ago!

Paul Goldschmidt’s contract with the Cardinals basically worked out the way that a five-year, $130 million contract for a guy in his early thirties should–he out-performed his annual salary for his first few seasons (his 2020 “value” per FanGraphs comes in at under his $26 million average annual value, but with salary proration, he was easily worth the money), he was basically exactly what you’d expect for that cost in 2023 even as the team itself floundered, and in 2024, Paul Goldschmidt was objectively overpaid but that’s just the cost of doing business with a veteran. Overall, the extension gave Matt Holliday vibes–extremely worth it early on, and while the latter part of the contract closed the gap some and it is understandable for the team to be glad to have the contract off the books going forward, it was a net positive.

The Cardinals have a fair amount coming off the books for 2025–Goldschmidt’s $26 million in salary is the most notable chunk, but they will no longer be paying professional Veteran Presences Matt Carpenter and Brandon Crawford to ride the pine, and short-term pitcher acquisitions Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn, and Andrew Kittredge are no longer on the Cardinals. These players come out to a little over $51 million in salary. For contrast, MLB Trade Rumors projects that Juan Soto, the top free agent in this year’s class, will make a little over $46 million per year over the course of his next contract. The St. Louis Cardinals can afford Juan Soto.

To be clear, the Cardinals aren’t going to sign Juan Soto. And there is a case to be made that signing Juan Soto would not be a great long-term fit for the Cardinals anyway, not because Juan Soto isn’t awesome or isn’t clearly the most exciting free agent in this year’s class, but because as great as he is, the Cardinals aren’t one relatively inflexible corner outfielder/designated hitter away from excellence.

So the next intuitive step is to, to borrow a phrase from Moneyball, replace Juan Soto-level production in the aggregate with a series of (relatively) smaller deals. With the departure of multiple starting pitchers in free agency, the Cardinals could spin the wheels on Jose Quintana, a 2022 rental who pitched well for the Cardinals during his brief tenure in St. Louis, for an estimated two years and $20 million total. If the Cardinals aren’t convinced they can assure avoiding becoming sellers in 2025, famously St. Louisan Max Scherzer is available at an estimated one-year, $16 million salary that, even if his productivity were completely shot, would probably sell some tickets and jerseys. And after the Cardinals pieced together outfielders last season, a big and consistent thumper like World Series champion Teoscar Hernández could make a ton of sense to add some stability (three years, $60 million per MLBTR). Quintana, Scherzer, and Hernández have an annual cost slightly under that of the cost of one (1) Juan Soto and since there are significantly fewer years associated, the downside is inherently much less.

But this does not seem to be the game that the Cardinals are playing this off-season, though to be abundantly clear, they could. What I am suggesting above is not that the Cardinals have infinite money, nor that I expect the DeWitt family to spend more aggressively than the industry at large, but that simply spending at the rates at which they have spent in the recent past would make the Cardinals competitive on the free agent market. When speaking to the media, the Cardinals organization has alluded to the need to improve on the player development side–recent front office restructuring with Chaim Bloom cited as the heir apparent to the commands of the organization suggests that they are serious about this part–but this is not an either/or proposition. Dangling the likes of Nolan Arenado, Sonny Gray, or Ryan Helsley is not going to mean that Masyn Winn magically improves even more next season.

And to be clear, I wouldn’t mind the Cardinals shipping any of those three admittedly very good players in the offseason in and of itself. Nolan Arenado is now on the backside of a contract which, from the day the Cardinals acquired it (and in years before it), I have been comparing more to a fairly standard free agent signing rather than a grand swindle of historic proportions. Sonny Gray, while pretty good in his first season with the Cardinals, could probably yield an actual positive haul before that salary is reallocated to a larger quantity of pitchers. And Ryan Helsley, a reliever who is nearing free agency, is the prototype of a sell-high candidate for the Cardinals, and the one player on this list that, if traded, I am relatively confident that the Cardinals would be doing so primarily to get some good future pieces rather than to shed his relatively manageable salary.

But I want to be realistic about what the front office should do within the parameters they have been given. I think there is some credibility to criticism levied at John Mozeliak that he does not do a very effective job at convincing ownership to give the team more spending money, but I also tend to place blame primarily on the owners themselves, though given Mo’s track record of late for mediocre signings, I can’t say I would blame the DeWitts for feeling like they’ve made wiser investments. But in terms of what is a reasonable target, MLBTR’s four-person panel pegged two of their top fifty free agents as potential targets–Anthony Franco has the Cardinals acquiring Matthew Boyd for two years and $25 million, while Darragh McDonald has David Robertson heading to St. Louis for one year and $11 million. Not exactly Juan Soto, but it’s something!

Matthew Boyd fills an archetype that you, as a Cardinals fan, may recall–he is a left-handed starting pitcher by trade, a former Toronto Blue Jay born in 1991 who is coming off by some measure his best season as a starting pitcher in his career but also has a fair number of question marks about his durability. The good news about Matthew Boyd is that his contract would likely be shorter and probably cheaper than the one signed by Steven Matz, but he seems to be an inevitable frustration to whichever team signs him. Boyd has not thrown over 100 innings in a season since 2019, and while moving away from the “innings-eater” mantra associated with the Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn signings is not a bad idea, Boyd arguably sways too far in the other direction. Only four times in his career has Boyd thrown even eighty big-league innings in a season, and among those seasons, his best ERA was 4.39 and his best FIP was 4.32–these aren’t awful numbers, but if a team is going to take a gamble on an injury risk, one would like to see a bit more upside than that.

There isn’t really a direct parallel to David Robertson as much as he fits a certain archetype–he’s an old reliever. He will turn 40 shortly after next season begins. He has had the kind of bullpen career that will get him on a Hall of Fame ballot for precisely one year–he’s been mostly pretty good but was never really a true, lights-out closer. And while Robertson is coming off a good enough season with the Texas Rangers, where he posted a 3.00 ERA and 2.65 FIP, signing Robertson to a one-year deal would fit the track record of recent Kansas City Royals teams–sign rentals in order to late flip rentals. And maybe that works. But it also signals a white flag of surrender for the coming season.

The immediate reports that Willson Contreras will convert to first base seemingly gave the Cardinals’ game away–it was viewed entirely through the lens of what was good for Contreras, a strong-hitting but defensively divisive catcher, rather than noting that it was essentially an admission that the Cardinals weren’t even going to pretend to try to bring Paul Goldschmidt back to St. Louis. There are several good first basemen available this offseason, such as Pete Alonso and Christian Walker, who won’t even be given consideration as a replacement.

And this is seemingly where we will remain–arguing whether the free agents that the Cardinals can find from the five dollar DVD bin at Walmart are worth the energy we are expending on them, when even the relatively austere Cardinals teams of the recent past could afford to make serious splashes.