Cardinals give the Mariners another reason to hold the line on Brendan Donovan

Thursday marked an important date on MLB's offseason calendar, as it was the day for teams and eligible players to exchange salary figures ahead of arbitration. For their part, it was sort of a good news/bad news event for the Seattle Mariners.

Meanwhile in St. Louis, the Mariners' most coveted trade target got a nice little raise. The Cardinals agreed to terms with Brendan Donovan on a $5.8 million salary, a roughly $3 million increase on what he pulled in as an All-Star last year. Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was on it:

You gotta hand it to Donovan. The dude was a seventh-round draft pick in 2018 and he was never really a hot-shot prospect. Yet now here he is in 2026 as a millionaire several times over.

Brendan Donovan's pay bump gives Mariners another reason to hold the line

For Jerry Dipoto and the Mariners front office, however, there's also a record scratch at play here: that salary is more than Donovan was projected for.

The Mariners presumably have their own model for calculating arbitration salaries, but the one formulated by Matt Swartz of MLB Trade Rumors is pretty good, and it had called for Donovan to earn $5.4 million in 2026. He beat that by $400,000.

It's not a substantial sum, but it also isn't an isolated case as far as Donovan's price tag being heavier than expected. The Cardinals are treating him as a star-caliber asset in trade talks, so it's not ideal for the Mariners that Donovan is now literally more expensive.

The Mariners might make this work to their advantage if they can press the Cardinals on having lowered Donovan's surplus value. This is generally the currency on which MLB trades are based, with the idea being to quantify the gap between a player's pay and his hypothetical value based on his projected performance. The more a player is paid, the less surplus value he has.

Previous reporting from Katie Woo of The Athletic has specifically linked the Cardinals to Lazaro Montes and Jurrangelo Cijntje, and the Mariners may be willing to part with the latter. Though Baseball Trade Values sees Montes as the more fitting prospect in a one-for-one swap for Donovan, the Mariners might have hoped to swing a deal involving Cijntje and one or more lesser prospects even before Donovan's surplus value ticked down on Thursday.

Either way, it's hard to imagine the Cardinals softening their stance and saying, "Oh shoot, that's our bad! Let us go ahead and lower our asking price real quick." Donovan isn't the star they think he is, but they are in a position to sell high and they certainly need to get as much as they can for him.

But if they weren't already, the Mariners got another excuse to dig in their own heels on Thursday. If they don't succeed in getting the Cardinals to flinch on Donovan, walking away could be the best move.