It's time to rewrite the narrative on the Randy Arozarena trade

It's time to stop considering this a miss

Since Randy Arozarena broke out on the MLB stage last postseason for the Tampa Bay Rays, there has been a popular narrative that the Cardinals missed on the 26-year-old outfielder by trading him away. I suppose that’s been true, but he’s also been the only piece of that trade who anyone has had the opportunity to see a return on. Which means it’s still too early to really assess the results of the trade, right? Maybe not.

The terms of the trade send Arozarena and 1B/OF Jose Martinez to the Rays in exchange for pitching prospect LHP Matthew Liberatore and minor league catcher Edgardo Rodriguez. The two teams also swapped competitive balance round draft picks.

My initial reaction to the trade was disappointment. Of all the Cardinals’ outfield prospects, he was the one that I liked the most and thought was most likely to turn into a quality MLB caliber player. Across the board, he seemed to have the fewest flaws. It didn’t hurt that I felt that the Cardinals had misused him in 2019, when he produced with every opportunity he was given and they declined to expand his playing time, saying that they didn’t know what they had in him. Which always felt like a cop out, because playing him is the only way you find that out.

And then Arozarena broke out in the 2020 playoffs for the Rays as he helped carry them to the World Series. Articles about Arozarena’s emergence began to be written and we learned that 2019 was not the only time the Rays tried to acquire him. They had tried to get him back at the 2017 Winter Meetings. At the time, I wrote about that and FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal talked on the broadcast about Arozarena and mentioned that the Cardinals had viewed him as similar in potential to Tyler O’Neill and Harrison Bader. With star outfield prospect Dylan Carlson in the mix, Arozarena was expendable.

So we got to watch Arozarena ball out on TV while those three guys were still struggling to find their way and Liberatore was nowhere to be seen, thanks to a cancelled minor league season in 2020.

But then came 2021.

Arozarena continued to produce, hitting .274/.356/.459 with 20 home runs and 128 wRC+ in 141 games for the Rays. In his first full season at he big league level, Arozarena turned in a 3.3 WAR, making him the 65th most valuable position player in baseball.

But there are two parts to analyzing every trade.

The first is the return.

Liberatore, 21, climbed prospect lists to become a consensus top-50 prospect and posted a 4.04 ERA in 21 starts for Memphis in his first season above A ball. Which I’ll admit doesn’t sound amazing, but he got better as the season went on, posting a 2.55 ERA over his final two months of the season and may be a candidate to debut for the Cardinals next season and perhaps even a dark horse candidate for a rotation spot.

But the second way to analyze a trade is the decisions made instead. The “opportunity cost,” if you will.

For the Cardinals, that is O’Neill, Bader, and Carlson.

O’Neill was the breakout candidate of this group by far in 2021. He would benefit from hitting in a lineup that featured Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, hitting .286/.352/.560 with 34 home runs and a 144 wRC+. His 5.4 WAR ranked him 12th in MLB among position players and led the Cardinals.

Bader built on some of the success he’d pieced together in 2020. He would hit .267/.324/.460 with 16 home runs and a 110 wRC+. He was the second best defensive player in baseball behind the Royals’ Michael A. Taylor according to Fangraphs’ Defense Runs Above Average metric. His 3.4 WAR ranked 59th in MLB among position players.

Meanwhile Carlson did not have a dominant year in Major League Baseball, but he did put together a solid year for the Cardinals in his first real season in the Majors. He hit .266/.343/.437 with 18 home runs and a 113 wRC+. His 2.8 WAR ranked 85th in MLB among position players.

So this season, both O’Neill and Bader were more valuable than Arozarena was while Carlson was within half a win and, while I may not completely agree, most smart prospect people seem to think he’ll be the best player of this bunch.

I’ve said for years that we see all these players the Cardinals have traded away go on and be productive with their new teams. And seeing that, if the Cardinals have faith in their player evaluation abilities, why aren’t they just letting the guys they kept play? We saw the benefits of doing that this year.

I think the Cardinals absolutely deserve credit now for not letting Arozarena languish in Memphis this year like they did with a player like Lane Thomas. Instead, they dealt him while he still had enough prospect value and acquired a top-60 prospect in return for a guy who had never been featured on any prospect lists and was undervalued by his own team.

And this is not the Cardinals’ first rodeo with a trade like this. As I was writing this, I recalled when the Cardinals traded Marco Gonzales to the Mariners in 2017. Gonzales was back from injury and proving to be an effective starter in Memphis, but there was no opportunity ahead of him in St. Louis. Rather than let him sit, they flipped him to Seattle for a top-100 prospect who had struggled upon his promotion to Triple-A. That player was Tyler O’Neill.

Gonzales has been a consistent and reliable starter for the Mariners over the last four seasons and I felt deserved some Cy Young votes for his stellar performance in 2020. O’Neill had failed to establish himself as a reliable MLB contributor until this year.

I had expected that it would take until Liberatore solidified himself in the Major Leagues in 2023 or even 2024 for the scales of this trade to start tipping in the Cardinals’ favor, but I think that even at this point, I don’t see how you can consider this a miss by the organization. If anything, this is already a win for the Cardinals. And once Liberatore debuts, it has the potential to tip the scales even further.

So instead of talking about this trade as a failure of the Cardinals’ player evaluation abilities, perhaps we should call it what it really is: A win.

And potentially a really big win at that.