Since rebuilding isn’t the Cardinal Way, what should fans expect at the trade deadline?

If you’d been considering purchasing a new Nolan Arenado jersey but were holding off due to anxieties around the coming trade deadline, have no fear. If you find a deal that suits your fancy, you should feel free to buy with confidence.

Put another way: Arenado isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Paul Goldschmidt.

The St. Louis Cardinals seem bound to sell at the deadline, but there’s an order of magnitude between tearing down to the studs and tearing the studs out entirely.

In London, Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak was asked to reiterate the team’s position on scorched earth reconstructions and was unequivocal.

“I would hope the Cardinals aren’t allowed to rebuild,” he said, nodding to expectations both from ownership and from the marketplace.

Should this team ever struggle to win 50 games in a season the way some of the more putrid Baltimore and Houston outfits did, it would absolutely not be by design.

That would be what trading the corner infield duo would represent. Even under the assumption that each would return multiple slam dunk Major League prospects — quite an assumption, given the inherent gamble — what would the time frame be on such a return? Would Cardinals fans sit patiently through a five-year process?

The widespread reaction to just this year of futility suggests that the meltdown would be substantial, and calls for retribution would be widespread.

It seems likely that after this unexpected season of discontent, there will be some accountability (read: lost jobs) spread throughout the organization. However the baseball operations structure is staffed from this winter forward, those in charge will need firm building blocks from which to begin, and they don’t get any more solid than the team’s current third and first basemen.

Arenado’s decision to forgo the second opt out in his contract and commit to five more years in St. Louis wasn’t made because he was hoodwinked. It was made because the free agent market likely would not have yielded a significant increase in earnings potential over his current deal, and because he’s already wasted half his career in one moribund situation and he felt allergic to risking another.

Goldschmidt, similarly, is far more likely to sign an extension in St. Louis this winter than to be settling into a new, temporary home. The deal he signed in spring training in 2019 was made with an eye on legacy and a soft plan to extend his relationship with the team through the end of his career, not to see himself shuffled off elsewhere down the line.

This is a team, after all, that has made a sustained commitment to keeping its biggest stars in uniform through the duration of their careers. Ownership, remember, had to be leaned on heavily by the baseball operations group in order to prevent a damn-the-torpedoes approach to retaining Albert Pujols following 2011; even then, he was brought home for a mandatory and fruitful victory lap.

Setting aside those commitments and the history of the team’s transactions, there’s also this: Arenado and Goldschmidt each hold no trade clauses, and one year of losing isn’t near enough to make either reconsider the newly-comfortable structures of their personal lives that they’ve shaped around being Cardinals.

If Arenado’s time in Colorado taught him anything, it’s that there’s virtue in being up front about displeasure. If he wanted out, or felt as though he’d been shortchanged by the team, there would be no ambiguity. We would not be left parsing words and phrases from a cattle call interview session in the midst of the All-Star hullabaloo to determine whether he’s secretly planning to beat a path out of town.

When he beat that path out of Denver, he did so with crystal clear intent. He leveraged his original opt out clause to force a deal to his singular preferred destination, and then had new teammates (namely Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright) happily acknowledge that they’d been working behind the scenes to orchestrate that trade for a number of years. He personally stuck his hands into the financial negotiations between the Cardinals and Rockies because he wanted the deal done, and he would not be denied.

Whether either Arenado or Goldschmidt have performance peaks which align with the current Cardinals competition window is a fair question. It’s also true that the team gets less predictable as they get less competitive. Rival executives league-wide are expecting a significant sale at this deadline, but it’s telling that none is whispering about shopping around the corner infield.

None of Jack Flaherty, Jordan Hicks, Jordan Montgomery or Chris Stratton are likely to be Cardinals next season whether they’re traded before August 1 or not. For a team that won’t make the playoffs, trading them is simple; that’s how the rental market works, and a team can sell short without really impacting what happens further down the road.

Trading Arenado and Goldschmidt would mean something else entirely. That’s not a language the Cardinals speak, and they’re not about to try to learn.