Where do Colorado, Arenado and the St. Louis Cardinals go from here?

A baseball player with almost a quarter of billion left on his contract burning a bridge with the franchise on the hook for paying him, is unprecedented. Nolan Arenado clearly wants out. What will his club do? What can Arenado’s suitors, like the St. Louis Cardinals, do in order to take advantage of the turmoil?

I will assume for purposes of this article that everyone is familiar with the situation regarding Colorado Rockies’ third baseman Nolan Arenado. If not, you can read articles first here and then here and here. I want to focus on what can happen next and how it may involve the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Rockies have found out the hard way that a contract with a player containing a no-trade clause, a player opt-out on the front-end, and a huge price tag, is really a one-way contract.

The Cardinals and Texas Rangers are the two “strongest suitors” of an Arenado trade at this point. But will he even be traded?

Cutting right to the chase, here are the things that can happen:

The Colorado Rockies can fire their entire front office as an apology to Arenado. Indeed, Redbird Rants’ sister-site for all things Rockies, Rox Pile, is calling for this. Although it seems Draconian and unfair to GM Jeff Bridich and his staff and their families, as vague as the charges against them seem, this could potentially return Arenado to being the face of the franchise … at least until the next time the L.A.-born superstar decides that the Rockies are doing something or not doing something that amounts to disrespect. (The main theory for what he means by “disrespect” is that the Rockies, paying him a quarter-billion dollars, are not doing enough to sign other players to produce a winner, plus Bridich’s tone when he delivered the bad news last Fall). With their trade leverage vastly reduced since everyone knows Arenado wants out, the Rockies can just “switch up” and decide to play Arenado for the whole two years.

Believe it or not, there are worse things than having a player on the threshold of Hall of Fame greatness and grooming himself for a deal with say a Yankees or Dodgers (his home town) playing 300 plus games for you. Coors Field would be in store for some major structural damage the next two years! And whether it is for income tax reasons or because the players union has sold the fiction that a player’s skills don’t drop off until he is in his late 30’s, the annual payments are very flat, meaning the Rockies are paying the same (or less) for Arenado in his prime as they (or the Dodgers) would be for his “sub-prime” years.

Even though the Rockies have lost an enormous amount of leverage the past 24 hours they could certainly trade Arenado for some future prospects with what leverage they have left. Arenado, himself, will have to start the trades. The longer the Rockies wait, that leverage reaches a vanishing point. But the Rockies can no longer “wait” or “hurry.” They can no longer resume trade talks at all, if they even wanted to, because of the evident fracturing of the communications with Arenado. Ironically Arenado, who, in a turnabout, seems to be more powerful than the franchise he plays for, even reportedly dictating what acquisitions the franchise should make, becomes the franchise. He and his agent must initiate the trade on behalf of the Rockies, talk to the prospective teams (if that violates some Collective Bargaining Agreement rule, then do it obliquely) and work out the terms. The chief terms are not even what players the Rockies are going to get: it is which teams Arenado will feel are doing enough to be competitive to be worthy of him waiving his no-trade clause and what compensation he will (and must, because players union) receive for waiving his opt-out in two years. This will be an odd situation where basically Arenado will be coming to Bridich and saying “I want to play for team x, and team x is offering players y and z, are you interested?” This will come as somewhat of a relief, time-wise for Bridich who can now focus on development issues that will hopefully bring the franchise – which has only emerged from the NLDS once in its entire 23-year history – into a competitivly higher echelon. It is much easier to be able to sit back and veto trades than to plan them. The St. Louis Cardinals, facing something of a backlash for losing free agent outfielder Marcell Ozuna over $200,000, can step up their pursuit, having gained the leverage that the Rockies lost. Perhaps a Dakota Hudson is no longer necessary for an Arenado package. But one issue that has arisen just this past weekend is that Cardinals Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. has said that salaries need to be capped at around $170 million. The Cardinals don’t have any readily-tradeable asset that could give them some payroll room to onboard Arenado’s salary. The only possible one is Carlos Martinez, who makes $11.7m. But Martinez’s trade-value is problematic. And even then, it would probably have to be a three-way trade where a third team got Martinez and sent prospects back the Rockies way. And of course, the Cardinals are not really dealing with pitching surplus now, but would probably part with a pitcher or two for a good cause. And Arenado is the best of causes. So long as the pitcher’s name is not Flaherty, Hudson or Hicks. Ultimately, it depends on how bad Arenado wants to get out of Dodge. Perhaps he would take less on the front end from the Cardinals in exchange for more on the back-end when the Dexter Fowler, Matt Carpenter, and Brett Cecil salaries come off the books. The Cardinals are in an even better position to play a waiting game, than they were before the blow-up, as long as other teams reportedly interested in Arenado do not get ahead of the Redbirds in the hunt.

Time is on the Cardinals side,

somewhat

. The purpose of 2020, as established in the post-season press conference, was to give certain players time to get it together (veterans) or

Schedule