A longtime starting catcher for the Cardinals, who’s getting a bit advanced in age in baseball years, entered free agency for the first time and whose future with the only baseball team’s ever known is in doubt, but both sides are open to a deal and it will probably get done. That is a sentence that absolutely applies to Yadier Molina, but it could have been said verbatim 24 years ago.
On Halloween of 1996, 33-year-old Tom Pagnozzi was granted free agency for the first time in his career. He was drafted by the Cardinals 13 years earlier, in the 8th round of the 1983 draft.