Cardinals Rumors: What is St. Louis’ interest in D.J. LeMahieu?

D.J. LeMahieu is been connected to the St. Louis Cardinals recently, but their interest is more due diligence than anything, it appears.

The St. Louis Cardinals are interested in free-agent second baseman D.J. LeMahieu. But the team called him and his agent, Joel Wolfe, at the beginning of the offseason to “in part to get a sense of what the marketplace was going to look like,” according to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Goold adds that is currently where things stand between LeMahieu and the Cardinals, meaning there has been no progress in the last two months.

This makes the most sense rather than the Cardinals being a legitimate threat to sign LeMahieu. He is going to command a deal in the four-year, $100 million range and the Cardinals, who have already begun cutting payroll, simply do not have the room to add such a contract unless they continue to dump payroll. One option, of course, is trading Carlos Martinez and his $12.5 million salary, though no team has shown any interest in adding him.

The team is likely to add a second baseman this winter to compete with Tommy Edman. Kolten Wong remains an option, though there appear to have been some hard feelings when the Cardinals declined his club option this winter. He is drawing interest from other teams in free agency and is far from a sure thing to return to St. Louis.

How the Cardinals go about upgrading the second base position this winter will be tricky. They still need to re-sign Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, and also have to address the outfield. There is only so much money to go around, which means that some positions could see little attention. It is always possible the Cardinals follow a similar path as the Milwaukee Brewers, who just agreed to a deal with free-agent infielder Daniel Robertson on a one-year, $900,000 contract. Perhaps they pursue a similar deal with, say, Eric Sogard or someone along those lines with the hope of a bounce back season.

But the odds of LeMahieu being that player in St. Louis are virtually none. This is a rumor you can file away and forget about.