Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak admitted Wednesday that trading away 25-year-old outfielder Randy Arozarena appears to be a mistake.
“I will own that,” Mozeliak said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold. “That’s on me. You need to know your own players. We will revisit how we rank our own players and make sure that we don’t have something like this happen again.”
Arozarena was dealt last January in a deal that him, first baseman José Martínez and future considerations to the Rays in exchange for left-handed pitching prospect Matthew Liberatore, catcher Edgardo Rodriguez and future considerations.
As Sports Illustrated‘s Stephanie Apstein recently wrote of the deal, “In the end, what doomed Arozarena in St. Louis was simply the good scouting that had found him in the first place: The team had too many right-handed-hitting outfield and first base prospects. Arozarena was a stud, but so were Harrison Bader, Dylan Carlson and Tyler O’Neill, who are all on the major league roster. So are Nogowski and Lane Thomas, who are waiting for their chance. The Cardinals were flush enough that they traded Luke Voit to the Yankees and Óscar Mercado to the Indians in 2018. And on Jan. 9, 2020, they traded Arozarena to the Rays.”
“Some guys get the opportunity and run with it,” Quincy Latimore, who was among the first to recognize Arozarena’s potential, told SI. “He’s sprinting with it.”
Arozarena played in just 23 regular season games in 2020, dealing with a bout of COVID-19. But in the postseason, he thrived. He set single-postseason records with 29 hits and 10 home runs.
His 10th homer of the postseason came in the first inning of Game 6 and was the lone run Tampa Bay scored in the final game of the 2020 World Series. He was named the ALCS MVP when the Rays topped the Astros.
