Merry Christmas, everyone, and I hope you’re enjoying your holiday season. It’s a slow news day, and week, and month, which makes this the perfect opportunity for a cheesy Buzzfeed-style listicle. Today, let’s take a look at historical Cardinal trades and identify the ten best. Thanks to The Baseball Gauge’s trade database, we can put some real numbers to Cardinal trades- they use Baseball Reference’s version of WAR- and quickly identify which trades included the most future production changing hands.
That’s my methodology here. I’ve collected the most obvious contenders since 1892, then tabulated the future WAR provided to the Cardinals and the future WAR their trade partners received from the Cardinals.