Cardinals 'Top Priority' Of 2025 Offseason Revealed

Stop us if you have heard this before: the St. Louis Cardinals want to trade Nolan Arenado.

This has been the case dating back to last offseason and remains the case right now. If you follow the Cardinals, you've likely heard it all. Arenado has a no-trade clause and two seasons left on his deal. Also, he's coming off his worst offensive season of his career.

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Arenado isn't the team's only trade candidate, and not even the one who has been talked about the most recently. That is All-Star utility man Brendan Donovan.

The Cardinals are looking to make moves

Sep 23, 2025; San Francisco, California, USA; St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado (28) runs home after his solo home run against the San Francisco Giants during the seventh inning at Oracle Park. Mandatory Credit: Eakin Howard-Imagn Images | Eakin Howard-Imagn Images

Although there are a handful of trade candidates on the Cardinals' roster at this moment, The Athletic's Katie Woo joined MLB Network on Tuesday and reported that moving Arenado remains the team's "top priority."

"We'll start with least likely to be traded next, which is Nolan Arenado," Woo said on MLB Network. "But we'll get to this. It doesn't mean the Cardinals aren't motivated to trade him. In fact, moving Nolan Arenado remains the Cardinals' top priority for the second straight offseason. Now the reason why it might not happen next has more to do with his market. Of course the no-trade clause, contract, things that we are all well-rehearsed in based in, what we went through, basically the exact same thing last year."

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. There aren't many players in baseball who have been in more trade rumors than Arenado over the last year. Fortunately, ESPN's Jeff Passan made it sound like a deal is going to happen as well. He put some of the top trade candidates into tiers and Arenado was in the "where-will-they-go" category, rather than "probably-won’t-go" or "will-they-be-traded."

"Trade options: With a Tarik Skubal deal exceedingly unlikely, the attention will turn to three groups," Passan wrote on Threads. "The probably-won’t-go (Freddy Peralta, Hunter Greene, Byron Buxton, Steven Kwan), the will-they-be-traded (Ketel Marte, Jarren Duran, Joe Ryan, Pablo Lopez, ) and the where-will-they-go (Brendan Donovan, Luis Robert Jr., Jeff McNeil, Nolan Arenado). Plenty more coming Tuesday on this topic at ESPN dot com."

The noise won't be coming to an end until a deal gets done.

More MLB: Cardinals Outfielder Notably Absent From Top Trade Candidate List