Aug 28, 2022; Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Chaim Bloom, Chief Baseball Officer of the Boston Red Sox on the field before the game between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays at Fenway Park. Mandatory Credit: Winslow Townson-Imagn Images Winslow Townson-Imagn Images

Cardinals 'Top Priority' Of 2025 Offseason Revealed

Originally posted on St. Louis Cardinals on SI
By Patrick McAvoy | Last updated Dec 2, 2025 8:00 PM ET

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.

If you like our content, choose Sports Illustrated as a preferred source on Google.

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

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.

This article first appeared on St. Louis Cardinals on SI and was syndicated with permission.

More must-reads: