Grading St. Louis Cardinals trade packages for this year's trade deadline

The St. Louis Cardinals are one of the most fascinating teams to watch as the trade deadline is a little over a month away. They've been the most disappointing team in baseball outside of the New York Mets, and have so many different directions they could go at this trade deadline.

Some believe they should trade away superstars like Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt, but those rumors should be shut down barring a full-on rebuild on the horizon. Others still hold out hope for significant pitching upgrades that could be coming here soon. There's also a strong chance that the club sells off some of their impending free agents at the deadline this year.

The next few weeks of play will determine a lot of how this unfolds. Should the Cardinals falter and go on another losing streak, it's likely you'll see them add very little to their big league club outside of improvements for 2024 and beyond. But even just a few weeks of good baseball could put them in a position to do some "buying" as well.

We asked Cardinals' Twitter to submit trade packages that the Cardinals should look at this year. While I couldn't break down all of the ideas, there were actually a lot of very interesting packages suggested, and it really made me ponder for a while which moves made the most sense.

On the new few slides, I'll be grading each of the suggested trade packages, and briefly giving my take on them. I did my best to separate them into different categories to keep similar kinds of trades together.

Here are my grades for the Cardinals trade packages that were submitted