The St. Louis Cardinals do not intend to retain impending free-agent first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, according to The Athletic. Instead, the Cardinals will embrace a reset this winter that includes the cold corner.
Goldschmidt, 37, will wrap up the worst season of his career on Sunday. He entered having hit .245/.301/.412 (97 OPS+) with 22 home runs and 64 runs batted in. His contributions had been worth 1.3 Wins Above Replacement, per Baseball Reference’s calculations.
“This is probably the worst I’ve performed on the field in my career,” Goldschmidt told The Athletic. “That was disappointing, a good bit of that burden was on me. If I could’ve played how I believe I’m capable of playing, we could’ve won more games and maybe this might have turned out differently.”
Goldschmidt had previously never finished with an OPS+ below 115 in any of his first 13 big-league seasons, no matter the amount of games he played in that year. He seems all but certain to have to settle for a one-year pact with a club hoping for a bounceback because of his ball-tracking metrics — he still hit nearly half of his batted balls 95 mph or harder this season, suggesting he deserved better topline statistics.
It’s obviously too soon to know who the Cardinals will turn to at first base come 2025. The most notable potential free-agent first basemen include Pete Alonso and Christian Walker, but it seems unlikely that St. Louis will want to make a large investment to replace Goldschmidt. Meanwhile, the most obvious internal option is Luken Baker, who has posted a 103 OPS+ this year in 46 plate appearances.
The Cardinals could also move a player from another position to first base — Alec Burleson, to name one candidate, played plenty of first base in college and has 37 big-league appearances there coming into Sunday’s season finale.
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