This story was excerpted from John Denton’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
ST. LOUIS — The date was Oct. 7, 2022, Busch Stadium was packed on a sun-splashed St. Louis day and Cardinals cleanup hitter Nolan Arenado was at the plate in the fourth inning of a scoreless Wild Card Series game against the Phillies.
It was an otherwise ideal scenario for the Cards, with eventual NL MVP Paul Goldschmidt on first and a prime Arenado — he of the 30 homers and 103 RBIs that season — at the plate. The then-superstar teed off on a Zack Wheeler fastball that was 98.1 mph, but center cut and Arenado seemingly got all of it.
The ball left Arenado’s prodigious bat at 103.7 mph and a 27-degree launch angle. In old-school baseball parlance, Arenado absolutely scorched the ball and it seemed headed easily over the wall and toward nearby Ballpark Village — so much so that Wheeler disgustedly averted his eyes.
Predictive analytics can sometimes be wonky, but this particular smash by Arenado had an expected batting average of .837, an expected slugging percentage of 3.099 and a hit probability of 84 percent, per Statcast. Also, according to MLB.com research, balls that leave with that exit velocity and launch angle end up being homers 80 percent of the time, and it would have been a homer in five MLB parks.
However, swirling winds at Busch that day knocked that Arenado smash down, and incredibly, it landed in the glove of Phillies center fielder (and St. Louis native) Matt Vierling just in front of the wall. “I got Busch’d,” fumed Arenado, who disgustedly stared into the outfield throughout his walk to the dugout.
In many ways, that singular playoff at-bat — one filled with so much promise and one encapsulated with nearly perfect execution only to fall frustratingly flat — was a microcosm of Arenado’s five seasons with the Cards. An Arenado arrival in 2021 that was celebrated nearly as joyously as a World Series parade — at that time, he was seen as the missing piece that would ultimately lead the club to its 12th championship banner — ended with a whimper on Tuesday. More than a year after trying to ship the third baseman to Houston, a deal he blocked with his no-trade clause, the Cardinals found a suitable landing spot for Arenado with the D-backs. And in a sad sign of where Arenado is in his career and where the Cardinals are at in the beginning stages of their first full-scale rebuild in three decades, it took St. Louis throwing in $31 million in deferred payments to make the deal feasible.
“To be doing this [Arenado trade] and the number of [trades] we’ve done so far, you’re only doing something like this as an organization if you’re not where you want to be,” Cards president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom said reluctantly.
Former Cards front-office leader John Mozeliak was totally right in trading with the Rockies in 2021 to pair Arenado with Goldschmidt to form the most potent set of corner infielders in St. Louis since Albert Pujols and Scott Rolen won the 2006 World Series. And Bloom was justified in finding a new fit for Arenado, who is hoping to play for a contender before retirement.
In between, Arenado hit 118 homers, drove in 424 runs and pulled off nearly as many defensive gems. But remarkably, he played in just three playoff games with the Cards — one in 2021 against the Dodgers and those two in ’22 versus the Phillies — and he didn’t have a single postseason victory to show for it.
Following his 7.9 WAR, MVP-worthy season in ’22, Arenado hurt his once-powerful throwing arm in the World Baseball Classic, and it started an unsightly three-year spiral. In the NBA, there’s a theory that players often only have so many jumps in their knees before injuries become commonplace. As it relates to Arenado, players apparently only have so many diving stops and sprawling catches into the seats and tarps before their bodies betray them. The fastballs that Arenado used to ambush and jerk into the left-field seats at Busch Stadium with those cat-quick hands inexplicably morphed into harmless flares to right field too often the past three seasons. It happens!
Arenado is only 34 years old, but it’s an older 34 because of how hard he’s always played and how fiery his white-hot intensity burns. He still cares deeply about winning and losing — sometimes to his own detriment.
Cards fans would be right in hoping that all that went wrong for Arenado in St. Louis goes right in Arizona. Maybe, just maybe, Arenado’s lasers will fly out of the park for homers in Arizona and not end up like the one that he hit in the 2022 playoffs that held so much promise only to come up symbolically short.
