Since the beginning of the offseason, the St. Louis Cardinals have maintained they want to stay around the $157M payroll they had last season. This would probably be thrown out if the team has a legitimate opportunity to get a transformative player like Nolan Arenado or Mookie Betts, but without one of them, their aim is to keep things similar.
With Marcell Ozuna gone, the Cardinals entered the offseason with about $152M on the books which didn’t leave them with very much room at all in the budget to make improvements to the team.