Mariners close to acquiring All-Star Brendan Donovan from the Cardinals: Sources

The St. Louis Cardinals are close to finalizing a trade to send All-Star infielder Brendan Donovan to the Seattle Mariners, multiple sources tell The Athletic. According to a league source, the move may be part of a three-team deal involving the Tampa Bay Rays. The trade is believed to be pending medicals.

Donovan, 29, was one of the most coveted players believed to be available via a trade this winter. The Cardinals shopped him throughout the offseason, though president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom insisted that dealing Donovan was not a necessity. St. Louis, which is rebuilding in Bloom’s first year as the Cardinals’ head of baseball operations, would only trade Donovan if doing so would net a significant return.

Roughly half the league showed varying levels of interest in Donovan throughout the early part of the winter, but the bigger priority for the Cardinals in November was trading starter Sonny Gray. They shifted their focus back to Donovan ahead of MLB’s Winter Meetings in December, with the Seattle Mariners and San Francisco Giants emerging as front-runners shortly thereafter. However, trade talks with both teams stalled, and Bloom pounced on a sudden opportunity to trade Willson Contreras to the Boston Red Sox instead.

The Cardinals continued talking to multiple organizations about Donovan leading into January, including the Red Sox, Giants and Mariners. The Giants were eager to add an infielder before spring training, and pivoted to signing free agent Luis Arraez on Saturday. That upped the ante for St. Louis, which led to Seattle’s final push.

The Cardinals had already traded veterans Gray and Contreras to the Red Sox in two separate trades. Those deals were done to clear payroll and open playing time for younger players. The Cardinals believed Donovan represented their best chance of landing a substantial prospect return. They were deliberate in negotiations as a result, leading to Donovan being traded much later in the winter than the majority of the industry first predicted. The Cardinals could have kept Donovan as a player to build around. Instead, they chose to make a move for the future as the Cardinals prioritize homegrown talent and player development heading into the 2026 season.

Super-utility All-Star

Drafted by St. Louis in 2018, Donovan climbed the Cardinals’ system as an underrated prospect and emerged as one of the team’s top performers over the last two years.

Primarily a second baseman in 2025, Donovan played mostly left field in 2024, and he’s played more than 100 career innings at third base, first base, shortstop and right field. He won the utility Gold Glove as a rookie in 2022 and was the Cardinals lone All-Star in 2025.

Donovan does not wow in any one aspect of the game. He doesn’t hit for great power, show extreme speed or play elite defense at any one position, but he does everything pretty well. He has a career 117 wRC+ — which has been fairly consistent throughout his career — and he’s amassed 5 Outs Above Average as a second baseman. He’s a roughly average baserunner with 30-plus doubles and 10-plus home runs each of the past two seasons.

He was worth 2.9 fWAR last season — basically the same as Riley Greene, Randy Arozarena and Ian Happ — which is exactly what FanGraphs Depth Charts projects for Donovan in 2026.

Two more years of team control

This was Donovan’s second year of arbitration, and he’s agreed to a $5.8-million salary for the upcoming season, more than double the $2.85 million he earned last year after going to an arbitration hearing.

Donovan will remain under team control for one more season, after which he will become a free agent unless he signs a multi-year extension.

That additional year of team control — and the reasonable salary for 2026 — gave the Cardinals some leverage in trade talks as they did not absolutely have to trade Donovan this winter or even this year. But trading veterans for prospects, clearly, has been the Cardinals’ M.O. since last summer.

Cardinals rebuilding under new leadership

Bloom took over as Cardinals president of baseball operations in October, and he’s since been full-steam-ahead in the team’s stated goal of rebuilding the Major League roster.

Since last year’s trade deadline, the Cardinals have completed eight Major League trades, purging some of the most familiar and expensive players from their roster. Since July 27, they have traded:

• Starter Erick Fedde to the Braves
• Closer Ryan Helsley to the Mets
• Reliever Steven Matz to the Red Sox
• Reliever Phil Maton to the Rangers
• Starter Sonny Gray to the Red Sox
• First baseman Willson Contreras to the Red Sox
• Third baseman Nolan Arenado to the Diamondbacks

And now, Donovan is close to being traded. In returns in the other deals, the Cardinals have primarily acquired younger talent that’s not yet on the Major League radar, but they did net a couple of big league-ready starting pitchers from the Red Sox (Hunter Dobbins and Richard Fitts). In the short term, they seem primarily to be carving out roles for young players already in their system to get regular at-bats and prove themselves one way or another at the MLB level.  

The new-look Cardinals

To supplement their pitching staff, the Cardinals made a couple of risk-reward free agent signings: Dustin May for their rotation and Ryne Stanek for their bullpen. Otherwise — barring a few last-minute additions — the staff is likely to be filled by 20-somethings who are still establishing themselves in the Major Leagues. There’s considerable runway, for example, for former first-round picks Matthew Liberatore and Michael McGreevy in the rotation.

The Cardinals’ lineup is similar because, despite the turnover, they’re not starting from scratch. The trades of Contreras, Arenado and Donovan have opened regular at-bats for young hitters who have been semi-regulars and role players in recent years. A potential lineup:

1.   Lars Nootbar, LF
2.   Masyn Winn, SS
3.   Alec Burleson, 1B
4.   Iván Herrera, DH
5.   Nolan Gorman, 3B
6.   Jordan Walker, RF
7.   Thomas Saggese, 2B
8.   Victor Scott, CF
9.   Pedro Pagés, C

The Donovan trade could also open infield playing time for JJ Wetherholt, the No. 7 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft and one of the most highly touted prospects in baseball.

And the Cardinals might not be finished trading. Nootbar is now the second-most expensive player on their roster ($5.35 million) and has only one more year of team control. Left reliever JoJo Romero is in his final year of control and making $4.26 million. Both could be dealt without creating too many short-term problems.