I am a Cardinals fan but I do not live in St. Louis... If you look at their payroll, you can see that this team has taken great care and gotten very lucky to avoid bad contracts. Compare Holliday's deal to Crawford and Werth and Bay, for example. I guess you can say that Lohse and Westbrook have not worked out but those are not calamities. What needs to be understood is that Barry Bonds was the best player of all time and that without steroids, the human body just cannot put up an OPS of 1.4 in an age 39 season.

They have put themselves in a decent position to let Pujols walk. I love the man, but this team is about winning baseball games. This is a mid-market team and they absolutely cannot afford to hand out disaster contracts like Joe Mauer and Alex Rodriguez and Alfonso Soriano and even Mark Teixeira have received (the list really does go on and on - I mean even look at guys like Todd Helton and Ryan Howard and think about how these deals worked out/will work out. Look at the wreckage.). $100 MM+ deals rarely work out and it is surprising that 2 of the ones that have/will are on the same team - Pujols and Holliday...

If I had to make a gamble on it I'd say there is a 40% chance of him leaving... He has now won 2 WS here and I think he will be looking for as much money as possible - but again, I do not believe Mozeliak will hand out more than $190MM-$200MM. If he signs with the Cardinals, I'd say something like 6/$150MM is likely. But honestly, good for him if a team wants to spend more.