The Nolan Arenado trade, if I recall correctly, went like this:
Rockies get…
- Austin Gomber
- Elehuris Montero
- Tony Locey
- Mateo Gil
- Jake Sommers
Cardinals get…
- Nolan Arenado
- “Up to $51 million”
For that “up to $51 million,” Roster Resource has it broken down as follows:
- 2021: $14.4M
- 2022: $5.6M
- 2023: $21M
- 2024: $5M
- 2025: $5M
Arenado, meanwhile, is owed an even $35M per year through 2024, which drops to $32M in ’25, $27M in ’26, and $15M in ’27. He can opt out after this year. He can opt out after next year. Nolan Arenado turned thirty years old in April. He’ll turn 36 in April of 2027.
So far, to date, Arenado has accumulated 3.2 fWAR. He’s projected to finish the year with 4.2 fWAR. In 2019, he was worth 6.0 fWAR, a number he hovered around in 2017 and ’18 as well. If we say Arenado’s having a down year and will bounce back a bit before hitting the aging curve, we can assign him 4.5 fWAR for next season, 4.0 for 2023, 3.5 for 2024, 3.0 for 2025, 2.5 for 2026, and 2.0 for 2027. In that universe, he’ll have been worth 23.7 fWAR by the end of his contract, and the Cardinals will have paid about $163M for it, saving roughly $27M from what they’d have had to pay on the open market if we go to the overly-simplistic-but-useful $8M/WAR valuation. I’m not sure how the Colorado pieces of the payments work if Arenado opts out, but given that the only potential causes for that are 1) Arenado not wanting to play in St. Louis and 2) Arenado thinking he can get more money on the open market, it’s unlikely Arenado will indeed opt out. He’d have to be somewhere around 5.0 fWAR next year to make that an even projection under the 0.5-fWAR-decrease-per-year, $8M-per-fWAR dichotomy, and likely closer to 6.0 fWAR again for it to make sense for him financially (CBA renegotiation could change all this, but it’s hard to say how, and it’s hard to imagine anything changing the cost of WAR by magnitudes).
An estimated median scenario, then, is that the Rockies will have given up roughly 23.7 fWAR and gotten $163M in flexibility, plus the five players they acquired. Going back to that $8M/WAR rate, one would expect the Rockies to be able to purchase about 20.4 fWAR in value with the $163M they saved, meaning the amount of production they’d need to get from those five players would need to be roughly…3.3 fWAR.
After yesterday’s outing, Austin Gomber has amassed 1.6 fWAR for the Colorado Rockies. He’s projected to hit 1.9 by season’s end. At only 27, it seems a solid bet he can repeat a similar performance next year, effectively “tying” the trade for the Rockies. Among the four other guys, Locey, Gil, and Montero all grade out as 40 FV players on FanGraphs, worth a combined $16M by FanGraphs’s prospect valuation system. Out of those three, you’d expect the Rockies to get enough value to make up the rest of that 3.3-fWAR gap even if Gomber were to, God forbid, be annihilated by a meteor the next time he takes the mound.
The trade was an odd one, to be sure. The Rockies had just signed Arenado to this monster deal two years prior. They had invested in him through 2026. He could still be around, and around at a reasonable rate, the next time they wanted to contend. But realistically, given how good the Dodgers and Padres were expected to be (we didn’t know what the Giants were about to do), the Rockies weren’t in a great boat to contend while Arenado was at his best. Now, to be fair, he was expected to be better this year. Expectations could have been as high as to have him at a 6.0-fWAR season, something that would change those future projections such that the Cardinals would expect to get 7.8 more fWAR, or roughly $62M more in value. But on the baseball field, the Rockies weren’t giving up much championship probability. They could have gotten a better return, but they still got a good one, and again, they didn’t give up much championship probability, considering Arenado’s production arc and their arc of hope run perpendicular. Off the baseball field, it was worse. Arenado was the face of the Colorado Rockies. There’s value to that. But that value isn’t worth more than a few wins financially, judging by league-wide treatment of faces of franchises.
Really, the trade was odder for the Cardinals than it initially was treated as being. It put the Cardinals in the front of the NL Central pack, but hardly there, with the Brewers roughly as good on paper and the Reds and Cubs each not far off the pace talent-wise. It left them far behind the Dodgers and Padres, and not too dissimilar from the NL East contenders, setting up an even-if-they-made-the-playoffs pennant probability of something like one in six. The Cardinals reached opening day with a World Series championship probability, per FanGraphs, of just 0.9%, with something like thirty million dollars of luxury tax space burning a hole in their pocket. Declining Kolten Wong’s option wasn’t a decision made at the same time, so the revenue questions there may have been fair, but again, more free agency moves could have been made, and while they might have been trying to build a big window, their 2022 outlook is, at the moment, poor.
Trying to say “what the Rockies should have done” is a fool’s errand. The Rockies were, and still seem to be, playing a different game than the rest of baseball, to put it charitably. But from a pure dollars and wins standpoint, this trade is looking remarkably even seven months later. Some of that is due to Arenado underperforming. But not all of it.
