Did the St. Louis Cardinals Miss Their Window with Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado?

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The St. Louis Cardinals, coming off an abysmal 71-91 season in 2023, are in the midst of a what could be a second consecutive losing campaign in 2024. As the club sits seven games below .500 in the middle of May, there are a lot more questions than answers regarding this season.

No one thought the Cardinals were truly as bad as their record showed last year – after all, they still had (and have, on paper) two of baseball’s premier position players in third baseman Nolan Arenado and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. Plus, many had them primed for a resurgence in 2024 after an active winter.

But perhaps last season was the first warning sign about the Cardinals, one that we didn’t heed seriously enough because St. Louis has “earned” the benefit of the doubt in so many baseball fans’ minds for their tradition of winning baseball.

The Arenado-Goldschmidt Era in St. Louis Has Been Surprisingly Underwhelming

What if I told you that the Cardinals had yet to win a playoff game with both Arenado and Goldschmidt on the roster together?

Let’s start by putting this all into context. Goldschmidt joined the Redbirds in 2019 when they acquired him from the Diamondbacks in exchange for catcher Carson Kelly and pitcher Luke Weaver. Arenado arrived two years later in what is widely viewed as a lopsided trade between St. Louis and Colorado (the Cardinals having emerged as fairly obvious winners).

But step back for a second: considering that the Cardinals’ objective is to win every year, how successful have those trades really been? After Goldschmidt’s first year in St. Louis, in which the club made it to the NLCS (losing in a sweep to that year’s champions – the Nationals), they haven’t come close to returning to the doorstep of the World Series.

In fact, they’ve gone progressively backwards. The Cardinals lost to the Padres in the 2020 Wild Card Series and haven’t made it past that round since. Keep in mind – this is still the case even after acquiring Arenado just before the 2021 season.

A Cardinals team that should’ve been a bona-fide force with the duo of Arenado and Goldschmidt heading into 2021 wasn’t to be come October, as they would lose that season’s Wild Card game to the Dodgers.

And the next year, a similar fate awaited, as St. Louis would suffer a Wild Card series sweep at the hands of the Phillies.

This is all to say, despite the fact that Arenado and Goldschmidt have two postseason appearances together, they have no playoff wins to show for it. And that’s a far cry from “The Cardinal Way” that has come to define St. Louis’ illustrious and rich franchise history.

At the same time, however, it’s also evident that this lack of team success doesn’t have much to do with Arenado or Goldschmidt’s individual production. In fact, let’s look at each player’s statistics since they were traded to the Cardinals.

Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt, since arriving in St. Louis: