A melancholy end to what could have been for Cardinals and Nolan Arenado

Best Podcast in Baseball

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Sports, Baseball

4.6 • 690 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2026

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you sensed some melancholy from both the Cardinals as they announced trading a Hall of Fame-caliber player to Arizona and also from that player, Nolan Arenado, as he described feeling "in the way" where once he expected to retire, that's fair. There was that disappointment on both sides as what could have been came to an end.

In a brand new episode of the Best Podcast in Baseball, St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer Derrick Goold and editor Nathan Mills discuss the conclusion of a trade more than a year in the making and potentially a streak that stretches back more than a century. For more than 100 consecutive years, without pause, the Cardinals have had a Hall of Fame player or manager in uniform with the team, and that streak could end with 2025.

Or, it will be a young player who has yet to emerge as an All-Star who we'll discover in hindsight continued it.

The Cardinals reach their annual Winter Warm-up after trading their third namebrand All-Star of the offseason and facing a difficult task of selling a team to a fan base that already had a record-low appetite for purchasing tickets. The pulse of the fans will be on display during the weekend Warm-up, but less clear is how the Cardinals will promote their future and what jerseys will fans be able to purchase. Mills and Goold discuss that and more, like who takes over at third base for the Cardinals and who should take over at third to excite the fans.

The podcast concludes with one things fans can look forward to doing in 2026 and how that one thing, voting Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina into the team's Hall of Fame, can be used to create an event that will thrill Cardinals Nation as well give the current Cardinals a feel of what the ballpark is like at its best.

Halls of various fames become a recurring theme of the podcast, allowing Goold to note there may not be a Hall of Fame at his high school but he can totally brag about being in class with a future astronaut, Jack Fischer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's a brand new best podcast in baseball.
0:02.2	And then there was one.
0:03.6	Not one podcast or only one person talking to you on this podcast,
0:06.7	but one remaining All-Star on the Cardinals roster.
0:10.5	That's right.
0:10.9	It's Brendan Donovan after the Cardinals traded Nolan Aronado to Arizona.
0:15.4	Joining me this week is Nathan Mills,
0:17.1	editor at the Post Dispatch to talk about the trade more than a year in the making.
0:21.1	Cue the music.
0:28.4	Hello, everybody, and welcome to the best podcast in baseball, brought to you by Closet by Design of St. Louis.
0:32.4	I'm St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer, Derek Gould, joined this week again by editor Nathan Mills from the post
0:38.6	dispatch. Nathan, how did the news hit you? The Cardinals, they trade Nolan Aronado along with
0:44.7	close to $30 million for a right-handed pitcher who was drafted in the eighth round this past year.
0:50.8	What did you think? As you read about it, as you heard about it, as you saw it happen?
0:55.3	Yeah. So it's, you know, year in the making. This is the thing that they've talked about
0:59.0	since openly, you know, since last off season. Of course, it's been, you know, one of the biggest
1:04.4	topics among fans. And then it got here. And, you know, honestly, I kind of felt like when it got
1:08.4	here that, like, you know, there would be like a celebration or there would be, you know, there would be more fanfare to it, but it was just like, me, you know, it happened. It's like the stranger things finale. That's how I felt about it, you know, waiting for all the pomp and circumstance. And then it was just, it's over. It was shorter, though, than the episodes. Like, let's be honest, like the Nolan Ar over it was shorter though than the episodes like let's be
1:28.6	honest like the nolan iron arnold oh it was shorter than a few oh yeah the the stranger thing
1:32.9	episodes especially in my house because my daughter's been watching them on repeat for six months
1:37.5	so it's felt like yeah it's been terrible yeah but yeah just yeah i i kind of expected you know a little
1:43.3	more uh not necessarily in return,
	...

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