Cardinals history shows there are gems to be found at the MLB trade deadline

If there is one baseball-adjacent skill at which the St. Louis Cardinals have remained absolutely world class over a period of stagnation in success, it’s celebrating the successes which came before them.

Friday night at Busch Stadium, the team will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 2004 National League champions and the 60th anniversary of the 1964 World Series champions.

Players from both teams will be in attendance. They will receive warm rounds of applause, and fans will receive giveaways. People who go will in large measure find the event to be moving, and there’s bound to be a degree of expressed wistfulness for the teams of the past.

That 1964 championship team started the season without sufficient outfield depth to complement Curt Flood in center. Stan Musial had hung up his cleats after the prior season. In June, Bing Devine’s team needed a spark.

Assuming all the risks that accompany a trade with a rival – and benefiting from a racist system of quotas that saw Cubs GM John Holland attempting to shuffle off young Black players – the Cardinals swung a six-player deal centered around Lou Brock and Ernie Broglio that would go down as one of the most disastrous deals in baseball history.

Brock would finish 10th in MVP voting following the trade, and he hit .300 with five runs batted in in a seven-game defeat of the New York Yankees in the World Series. He then played 15 more years in St. Louis, set a new career stolen base record, and was elected to the Hall of Fame before being lauded as a franchise legend for decades to come.

The 2004 team had a similar outfield issue which was filled by a dissimilar player. Larry Walker was ready to win as the August waiver deadline approached, and he got his wish in a deal which sent three players to the Colorado Rockies, none more accomplished than eventual journeyman lefty Chris Narveson.

Walker didn’t win a championship in St. Louis. That team ran into the buzzsaw Red Sox in the World Series, and in 2005, his final season, they were bested by the rival Houston Astros to essentially wrap up one of baseball’s best ongoing duels in the early aughts.

The deal might not have worked out perfectly, but the image of Walker in red remains a pleasant rather than unfortunate recollection, and the Cardinals were included in the celebration upon his own Hall of Fame induction.

It’s almost never as simple as acquiring impact players for free. However things unfold for the Cardinals in the days approaching this year’s trade deadline , it is exceptionally unlikely that they’ll be acquiring a player who will have his own Hall of Fame induction some day. Those sorts of players rarely get moved during the season, and when they do, it’s in the sort of pure rental framework with high costs that these Cardinals are loath to pursue.

Prudent shopping has served them well. J.A. Happ and Jon Lester bolstered the 2021 Cardinals; Jordan Montgomery and José Quintana were arguably their two best pitchers down the stretch in 2022. None jumped off the page at time of acquisition, but all did as was requested of them and eventually departed with warm wishes and good feelings (save perhaps Montgomery, who did at least win a title in Texas before being cast asunder into the barren free agent market).

When modern front offices talk about log jams and the difficulty in setting markets, it’s because there’s relatively little diversity of thought in the pursuit of efficiency. It shouldn’t come as a shock that smart people working from the same data sets come up with similar conclusions and therefore have a hard time finding inflection points. There really are no more hidden gem prospects or maverick organizations flying by their collective pant seats; not everyone can make a deadline deal with the Rockies.

Still, the Cardinals were at home on Friday, August 6, 2004 when word of the Walker trade began to trickle through Busch Stadium II, and there was a buzz. In an era before smartphones and instant access to information, rumor became reality and the collective chatter grew louder until the game on the field mattered less than the games which would follow.

The collective baseball world focuses its attention on the deadline and holds its breath in the immediate run up because trades are fun. Player movement is fun. The chance for fans to dream on possibilities and convince themselves that a shiny new toy will be the cure for all that ails is valuable, and the last big transactional plunge into a pennant race is almost like finding Opening Day all over again.

The Cardinals will make additions in the coming days, and they will be prudent. It will be a departure from last season’s talent drain, and it will signal that being back in the race is sufficient to give a team a boost. Lots of teams go many years in a row without trying to win; the Cardinals couldn’t stomach two.

Those dramatic changes, though, can go a long way.

A couple dozen players with hardware on the field Friday night will be able to speak convincingly of that, and then they’ll go back to waiting for the next deal to come through right alongside everyone else.