Are the Cardinals overrating Brendan Donovan in trade talks?

Brendan Donovan is still a Cardinal, and with recent reports painting a picture regarding the nature of the Cardinals’ asking price for their All-Star second baseman, it’s starting to look as though there’s a better chance than I previously believed that Brendan Donovan will still be a Cardinal when the team reports to Jupiter, Fla. in a couple of weeks.

Earlier this week, The Athletic’s Jim Bowden became the latest pundit to weigh in on the nature of the Donovan trade talks, detailing his impression from league sources that the Cardinals are asking for too much in exchange for Donovan’s services.

This dichotomy has been fascinating to follow on social media in recent weeks, as fans of teams purportedly interested in Donovan post their mock trade concepts, with some fellow fans wondering why in the world their team would pay so much for Donovan via trade. Then, there are the Cardinals fans who chime in that the Cardinals wouldn’t dream of letting go of Donovan for so little of a return.

Somewhere in the middle probably lies the truth about the Donovan market, but it’s telling that the Cardinals have held serve to this point despite what had been reported at the outset of the off-season as heavy interest from around the league.

My general belief is that if Brendan Donovan is the fifth or sixth-best player on your contending team, that positions your team as a legitimate World Series threat. But for a Cardinals team looking to find its footing in the next era, Donovan is presently their best player.

If teams are looking to strong-arm the Cardinals into trading their best player with offers that value Donovan only as the would-be sixth-best player on their own team, then it makes sense as to why the Cardinals would be slow-playing the market. 

With two years of team control remaining and a conceivably reasonable price point on a hypothetical contract extension down the road, the Cardinals don’t need to trade Brendan Donovan right now—and in the way they’re wading through offers and conversations about him, they seem to be well aware of that fact.

In an interview with KMOX’s Tom Ackerman this past Sunday, Cardinals president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom gave a thoughtful and expansive answer to Ackerman’s question on the topic, detailing that the Cardinals aren’t necessarily angling to make sure Donovan ends up on another team.

“As much as we want to keep our ears open, we also want to make sure we’re doing right by the organization,” Bloom said. “In this case, if we were to contemplate something with Donnie, obviously, we'd put a pretty high price tag, given all of those things that I said about the player he is and how much he means to us. Certainly not something where we're necessarily looking to do it. Again, just us being responsible and doing our jobs, especially given where we are and all of those goals that we have over the long haul.”

So, per Bloom’s description, the extent of the Cardinals’ conversations with teams about the 29-year-old All-Star comes more from responding to the understandable outside interest in his talents than it does an aggressive attempt to move him.

Bloom concluded his answer by saying that a Donovan trade is “not something that we are proactively looking to do, just us being responsive to interest in our players as we would with anybody."

The POBO also added that although he doesn’t like to place hard deadlines on things, the Cardinals value the notion of providing clarity for their roster heading into spring training.

“As we get closer to spring training, you don’t want to let this drag on one way or the other,” Bloom said. “We don’t want uncertainty or a lack of clarity hanging over our camp.” 

One way to read this approach on Donovan is that the Cardinals are simply biding their time, hoping to receive stronger offers if desperation rises among the suitors later in the off-season. 

Another way to read it is at face value, as a sign that the Cardinals aren’t resigning themselves to a multi-year, long-haul rebuild that would see the organization tear things to the studs before rising from the ashes as a contender some time down the road. Things are fluid, and the return to prominence could come sooner than later if the Cardinals hit their marks in a number of areas this season.

If that’s the case, holding Donovan in high esteem as a player that the club would trade only for a franchise-altering haul stands to reason, being that there’s an alternative where keeping him around to help win ball games in the near term becomes a prudent path.

If the timeline for the organization getting where it wants to go is expedited relative to the current public perception, there should be no reason the Cardinals couldn’t explore an extension for Donovan before he hits free agency after the 2027 season, placing him in a role of prominence as the Cardinals establish enough other contributors on the roster to make a run at things without needing a lengthy ramp-up period to do so.

So, are the Cardinals overvaluing Brendan Donovan in trade talks? Not to my eye.

Moving Donovan just to move him would turn this concept of a rebuild into another thing entirely—one that could imply the Cardinals aren’t realistically aiming to win, or to spend to facilitate winning, for the next several years.

So far this off-season, the trades of Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras and Nolan Arenado all fall into the same bucket of responsibly rebuilding—shedding bloated salaries for players whose prime years are waning is more than defensible when you’re not destined to maximize your competitiveness in the current season.

But to move Donovan for less than the present asking price would signal another line crossed into deeper terrain of this rebuild. The Cardinals, rightfully, seem to be treading lightly upon that line.