Who was in this mystery "multiplayer blockbuster trade"?

On Tuesday night, Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com posted an article talking about the history of the Tampa Bay Rays’ pursuit of outfielder Randy Arozarena, who has been the breakout star of this postseason. So far, he has the rookie record for home runs in a postseason and is knocking on the door for the rookie record for hits as well. He has clearly been the central cog of the Rays’ offense on their charge to their second World Series berth.

Last winter the Rays acquired Arozarena, 1B/OF Jose Martinez, and swapped competitive balance round picks in the MLB Draft in exchange for LHP Matthew Liberatore and C Edgardo Rodriguez. And the further we’ve gotten from that trade, the more it’s become obvious that Arozarena, who had lit up the minor leagues for the Cardinals in 2019 and outplayed their top prospect Dylan Carlson across the same levels, was the centerpiece of the return for the Rays.

According to Ken Rosenthal on FOX’s World Series broadcast last night, he was told that the Cardinals generally viewed Arozarena as similar in potential to Tyler O’Neill and Harrison Bader, so they took the opportunity to get a top-level left-handed pitching prospect for a player they clearly didn’t value.

Okay, that last part was me, but why do I say that the Cardinals didn’t value Arozarena? You can just look at how he was treated. For starters, he was sent back to start the 2019 season when there wasn’t enough room in the outfield in Memphis, where he should have been. If they valued him, he would not have fallen below the guys who did make the outfield in Memphis. And then they hardly played him last year while he was in the big leagues despite performing in every opportunity, they gave him behind a starting player who had been struggling so badly he got demoted.

Perhaps the moral of the story for rival front officers should be that if the Rays ask for the same player twice, you should probably not only keep him, but immediately pencil him into a larger role. The Rays do this enough that I wonder how they keep their front office staffed and there isn’t just a revolving door.

But the most interesting part of the article may be a paragraph where the Rays talk about trying to acquire Arozarena once before, at the 2017 Winter Meetings.

At the Meetings in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., in 2017, the Ryas and the Cardinals had one of those talks and almost pulled the trigger on a multiplayer blockbuster trade, though neither Ibach nor anyone else with either team would divulge the principals who would have been involved. One thing for certain was that Arozarena would have been a smaller piece in that deal had it gone through.

So, I decided to go back and look at the Rays’ roster that year to see who might have been involved in such trade talks, and then it hit me: This was the winter of Stanton.

At the winter meetings that year, the Cardinals were deep into trade talks with both the Marlins for Giancarlo Stanton and the Rays about Chris Archer, Alex Colome, and Evan Longoria, or some combination of them.

The Cardinals’ interest in Colome was well documented, as they had approached the Rays about him before. Derrick Goold would later report in January that the Cardinals were more focused on Archer and their interest in Colome was overstated. Their interest in Longoria, whether they actually wanted him or were taking him on as salary relief to lower the prospect cost, is unknown.

That winter was a wild ride for Cardinals fans as the organization looked prepared to be as aggressive as required to improve their team after failing to reach the postseason for the second year in a row. The first time that had happened on John Mozeliak’s watch atop baseball operations in St. Louis.

On December 8th, the Cardinals officially swung-and-missed when Stanton exercised his no-trade clause to veto trades to both the Cardinals and the Giants, who are also suitors for Longoria. Six days later, the Cardinals acquired their consolation prize from the Marlins in Marcell Ozuna and finalized a deal to send Stephen Piscotty to the A’s. Despite all of that, the reports that the Cardinals could finalize a deal with the Rays for Colome and Longoria seemed tangible at that point it time. Then six days after that, the Rays dealt Longoria to the Giants and Colome would stick around in Tampa for another half season before being dealt to the Mariners.

But for the days around the Ozuna trade and until Longoria finally went to the Giants, that trade seemed so real. Like there was no way that it wasn’t going to happen. You had Colome and Archer both following Cardinals’ related accounts on Instagram and the buzz around it was bigger than anything before it or after it in Mozeliak’s tenure. It was even rumored at one point that Stanton had predicated his acceptance of the trade to the Cardinals on their acquisition of Longoria.

Compared to the trade for Jason Heyward, where the first clue was the press release in my inbox, the situation was so radically different.

The match for the Cardinals and Rays was good. The Rays were looking for salary relief and the Cardinals needed help on both sides of the ball, including a closer after Trevor Rosenthal had gone down with UCL reconstruction surgery that summer.

Colome, 28 at the time, had been the Rays’ closer the previous two seasons and had a 2.63 ERA and 84 saves and looked like a better answer than Rosenthal had been the previous two seasons.

The Cardinals’ interest in the then-31-year-old Longoria was a bit more confusing. Longoria had struggled recently, hitting .261/.313/.424 with 20 home runs and a 97 wRC+ in 2017 and had 5 years with $86 million left on his contract. But the year before in 2016, he’d been a 4.5 WAR player with a 123 wRC+. It’s hard to know how much of an upgrade over Jedd Gyorko he would have been, who was coming off a career year for the Cardinals in 2017.

The Cardinals still had the pieces to make a major move, they hadn’t depleted the farm with the Ozuna move as they had not given up any of their top-5 prospects—albeit perhaps that should be reconsidered in hindsight as the three pitchers given up in that deal, Zac Gallen, Daniel Castano, and Sandy Alcantara all appear to be MLB caliber starting pitchers—and more established MLB players like Randal Grichuk, who had been mentioned by Rays’ beat writers as a player of interest. Obviously, we know now that Arozarena would have been involved, but beyond that, there’s not much of what I’d consider reliable information on the Cardinals’ side of the trade.

But then just as quickly as it looked like the Cardinals were ready to take a big swing, they went quiet. Ozuna would be their final major move of the offseason, with their only other MLB move being dealing Grichuk to Toronto in January.

The result was continued struggles in 2018. Mike Matheny would be shown the door on July 14th and after a historic August rally under Mike Shildt, the team still failed to find the postseason for the third time in a row, matching the longest such streak of the DeWitt ownership group.

In many ways, the Cardinals’ inability to solve those offensive needs continue still to this day. Ozuna’s two seasons in St. Louis were disappointments compared to his expectations as he never materialized as a reliable middle of the order force in St. Louis.

And three winters later, we’re still waiting for an intervention on offense.