Early Tuesday morning, Fox’s Ken Rosenthal broke the news on Twitter: Troy Tulowitzki had been traded. The Colorado Rockies handed out their all-star shortstop to the Toronto Blue Jays. in the hours since, the full details of the exchange have been revealed. In exchange for Tulowitzski and veteran reliever Latroy Hawkins, the Blue Jays sent the following players to the Rockies:
- jose reyes, ss
- jeff hoffman, rhp
- miguel castro, rhp
- jesus tinoco, rhp
Apparently, the groundwork for this July deal was laid over the hot stove, when the two clubs engaged in preliminary discussions about Tulowitzki. The talks were reignited “in earnest” three weeks ago according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today. joined during last night’s rockies game, according to yahoo!’s jeff passan, prompting manager walt weiss to pull tulowitzki off him in the ninth inning.
Tulowitzki has long been associated with the Cardinals in the MLB trade rumor mill. things came to a head during the hot stove of 2013-14. the cards came from a 97-win season, a domestic league pennant and a World Series loss. His weakest link was shortstop, who had been managed by Pete Kosma and Daniel Descalso. As we wrote on VEB that winter, the Cardinals signed the Rockies over Tulowitzki, found the asking price for him too high, and opted to sign free-agent shortstop Johnny Peralta instead. as craig tweeted, the decision to sign peralta instead of trading for tulowitzki has worked out pretty well for st. Louis:
troy tulowitzki: 6.5 war since 2014, owes $105 million, contract expires at age 35. johnny peralta: 7.4 war, owes $27.5 million, contract expires at age 35.
st. louis post-dispatch beat writer derrick goold was a guest on cbs 920 on tuesday morning. When asked about the title trade, Goold mentioned interest from the cards during the 2013-14 offseason. host tim mckernan tweeted the following regarding goold’s response:
from @dgoold: the cardinals had an interest in tulowitzki…but a while ago. not recently.
On his birdland blog Tuesday, Goold also posted a nice post about the Cardinals’ past interest in Tulowitzki.
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Later Tuesday morning, Fox’s Jon Morosi dropped the juicy tidbit that according to his sources, the Cardinals touched base with the Rockies regarding Tulowitzki more recently:
sources: #stlcards spoke to #rockies about troy tulowitzki before he was traded to #bluejays. tulo is close to matt holliday.
It’s unclear what the #stlcards infield would have looked like, but one possibility was tulo at short, peralta at 3b, carpenter at 1b. @foxsports
#stlcards keeps looking to add a bat, as evidenced by the title search.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the Cardinals talking to the Rockies about Tulowitzki before the Blue Jays trade was finalized. front offices contact other front offices about players all the time, especially in the weeks leading up to the non-waiver trade deadline. they also do it for various reasons. sometimes it’s to help a club assess one of its players by seeing what another team demands of someone similar. other times, they are performing due diligence. We don’t know if the Cardinals and Rockies engaged in serious trade talks or if St. louis was touching base.
however, this indicates that general manager john mozeliak wasn’t afraid to get potentially creative with a roster update. the cardinals were thinking outside the box. unless st. Louis was willing to trade Cant (which seems unlikely) In a structure trade similar to what Toronto eventually agreed to with Colorado, the Cardinals were willing to at least explore reshuffling their infield to improve at first base. The scenario proposed by Morosi seems the most plausible, but perhaps Tulo would have moved to third, displacing Matt Carpenter to first.
All of that is debatable now. Obviously the deal fell through. in fact, it seems that the negotiations did not even get off the ground. and therefore the Cardinals will have to upgrade in another way if they choose to make a pre-deadline trade without a waiver.