Surprise Nolan Arenado suitor botched trade talks with Cardinals before Arizona deal

The St. Louis Cardinals finally ended the over-year-long Nolan Arenado trade saga on Tuesday, shipping their future Hall of Fame third baseman to the Arizona Diamondbacks for minimal salary relief and right-handed pitching prospect Jack Martinez.

Many questioned the Cardinals' ability to move Arenado in a trade this offseason due to his really poor 2025 season and the amount of money still owed to him, but in the aftermath of the trade, reports have surfaced that multiple teams were interested in acquiring Arenado before the Diamondbacks got a deal done with St. Louis.

One of those teams may come as a surprise to fans, and what may be even more surpising is just how cheap their front office got and why it prevented them from acquiring Arenado.

The San Diego Padres wanted Nolan Arenado but appear to have botched those trade negotiations

In a new report from Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the San Diego Padres were the other team that was most heavily interested in acquiring Arenado. With Manny Machado already holding down third base, the Padres were looking to bring in Arenado as their new first baseman, something they actually explored doing last offseason as well.

So what was the hangup? Well, it's been widely known for the last few seasons that the Padres are in a tight place financially, and so they have been hesitant to add much salary to their books and have seen their spending tail off. According to Rosenthal, the Padres were not willing to pay as much of Arenado's contract as the Diamondbacks were, so a deal with Arizona came to fruition.

Here's the odd part, though: the Diamondbacks are only paying $5 million to Arenado in 2026 and $6 million in 2027. So apparently, the Padres were unwilling to even pay that much for Arenado.

Here are a few things this confirms to be: First, teams did not see Arenado as anywhere close to a valuable asset, given the contract he was on. Various fans have been upset by the amount of money the Cardinals ate here and the lack of a strong return, but that was just the state of his market at this point in his career.

Second, if the Padres were truly a heavy suitor for Arenado, that's pretty cheap of them to believe they could not afford to bring him in on such a small salary. Maybe they were heavily interested if they could bring him in for free, but considering FanGraphs had Arenado worth about $7 million in a down season where he only played in 107 games, getting him for that dollar figure was not an overpay.

The fit with Arizona has made sense all offseason, but Arenado may have preferred to end up in San Diego, given his Southern California roots and the Padres roster. San Diego definitely has holes they need to figure out as well, if they are going to challenge the Dodgers in 2026, but they do have a bit more star power than the Diamondbacks have right now.