ESPN's trade deadline prediction for Brewers should have fans up in arms

With the 2025 MLB season nearing the one-month mark, it's becoming clearer where teams need to make improvements. As such, the early trade deadline predictions have begun, with playoff hopefuls looking to struggling teams across the league to provide them with the missing piece that they need to reach the promised land.

Early trade deadline predictions are often highly speculative as it's unknown which teams will be looking to buy and which teams will be looking to sell in two months’ time. As a result, these early proposals tend to take an extreme approach to the trade deadline, a strategy that the Brewers have not adopted in recent years, in an effort to imagine noteworthy pairings that would rattle the baseball world. One such proposal came last week on ESPN, when a writer proposed the Brewers' trade one of their talented young infield prospects for an expensive aging veteran.

A Luis Peña for Nolan Arenado swap would be disastrous for the Brewers

ESPN writer David Schoenfield is absolutely correct that the Brewers could use some stability at the hot corner. The left side of their infield in general has been a weak point to start the 2025 season. After trying out a platoon of Vinny Capra and Oliver Dunn to start the year, the Brewers have turned to offseason acquisition, Caleb Durbin, as their everyday third baseman for the last week. Durbin offered an immediate spark and has continued to show promise, but performance fluctuations are seemingly inevitable for the young infielder. Therefore, the Brewers could explore the third base and shortstop markets at the trade deadline in an effort to find more consistent production, using their current positional versatility to fill in as needed.

With third base as a position of need, and the St. Louis Cardinals sitting four games below .500, it's only natural that Nolan Arenado's name has continued to remain in speculative trade talks despite him remaining on the Cardinals' roster throughout the offseason (Arenado did reportedly turn down a trade to the Houston Astros during the offseason, exercising the no-trade clause included in his contract). However, even if Arenado is traded at the deadline, the Brewers will almost certainly not be the team to acquire him.

First of all, Arenado would not be a half-year rental like most typical trade deadline candidates. Not only would the Brewers be on the hook for the pro-rated amount of his $21 million contract in 2025, but they would also be responsible for the $31 million that Arenado is owed over the next two seasons. While it's likely that the Cardinals would send cash to the acquiring club, if the Brewers were unwilling to spend more than $5 million on free agents during the offseason, it's highly unlikely they will be willing to take on Arenado's contract regardless of how much money St. Louis includes.

Secondly, recency bias aside, it must be questioned whether Arenado is still worth the contract he signed over six years ago. Since finishing third in NL MVP voting in 2022, Arenado has posted an OPS+ of 106, meaning he's been barely above league-average at the plate in the last two seasons. As he plays in his age 34 season, that decline is concerning for any team looking to acquire Arenado. While he proved this past weekend that he can still impact the game on both sides of the ball, an Arenado trade feels like the kind of high-risk move that a team with a big payroll should take, not the cash-strapped Milwaukee Brewers.

So we've established that an Arenado trade doesn't make a ton of sense for a Brewers club that would be carving out more than 10% of its payroll to the aging veteran, but it makes even less sense if the Cardinals are asking for prospect phenom Luis Peña in return, as the article from ESPN suggested.

While most baseball fans are now familiar with the name Jesús Made, less are aware of the fact that an equally talented infield prospect was playing alongside him in the Dominican Summer League (DSL) last year. Luis Peña, the Brewers No. 9 prospect according to MLB Pipeline, was part of the same international free agent class as Made, and posted similar numbers in the DSL last season. Take a look at their stats side by side:

Made received more recognition due to his elite walk rate and higher home run total, but so far in 2025, with both players playing in Low-A for the Carolina Mudcats, it's Peña who has walked more than he's struck out, and Peña who has the higher slugging percentage of the two. In other words, the argument could be made for either player being the better prospect, but the point is that neither is worth giving up for Arenado, especially for an organization like the Brewers where production from young players on reasonable salaries is that much more important.

Schoenfield argues that Peña is redundant in a Brewers farm system that has Made and Cooper Pratt waiting in the wings, but just because Peña might currently be narrowly behind the other two shortstop prospects on the organization-wide depth chart, that doesn't mean the Brewers' front office should make a trade that heavily leans in favor of their division rival.

Additionally, both Peña and Made have demonstrated an ability to play third base, and who knows what the state of the Brewers' left side of the infield will be in 2028, when both of them are projected to make their MLB debuts. A lot can change in three years. For now, the Brewers should certainly hang on to both players, and avoid the expensive Arenado sweepstakes should they present themselves in late July.