So here we are again, stuck at the crossroads where frustration meets failure, where your wildest baseball wishes clash with your worst nightmares. Welcome to baseball's hot stove season, where all the good Cardinals offseason shopping sprees apparently go to die.

This winter, we are waiting to see how quickly Matt Holliday will spurn the Cardinals, or more accurately, how ownership will come up with another reason why it can't (or won't) pay the asking price for a player who clearly fits all their needs. This is not crazy speculation. This isn't even reasonable or even slightly arguable conjecture. This is fact, pure and simple. Holliday came to the Cardinals after the All-Star break and helped energize the team's second-half run to the National League Central title.

He was the bat that protected Albert Pujols in the lineup. He was the offensive threat who was so valuable to the Cardinals that management traded several top farm prospects to get the All-Star outfielder from Oakland after the team was unable to work out a trade for him during the last offseason.

So now there is one simple question that I might ask Cardinals ownership as they chart out their free-agent road map for this winter's silly season: Do they have the long memory of an elephant, or the fleeting one of a gnat?

Simple question, but not so simple an answer.

I'd like to know if Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. remembers how expensive he thought Holliday was last winter when the team failed to make a trade with Colorado, and whether the price tag went up or down by the time the team finally secured him in July with all those farm system prospects.

Does it make sense after all the Cardinals

invested in securing Holliday to simply let him go now to some other club willing to add a few million more to his paycheck when they know what his true value is to the team?

The Cardinals have to keep him. Otherwise, the trade in July was a failure.

The day the Holliday trade was struck, I remember thinking that there were only two ways to judge the success or failure of the deal:

1. Holiday and the Cardinals roll into the World Series.

2. The Cardinals don't make it to the World Series, but the team locks him up for the long term and he and Pujols form a power duo that leads the team into the postseason for four or five years and reaps at least one World Series title.

If Option 1 had happened, I don't think anyone would have begrudged Holliday if he decided to play the free-agent game and leave St. Louis. But once the Cardinals exited in that first-round sweep — and Holliday wore the goat horns for the loss to the Dodgers — everything changed.

The Cardinals have yet to get full value for the trade.

So they need to re-sign Holliday.

Period.

Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak says he has Plan A, B, C, D and probably E, F and G, too, as he enters the free-agent market. There is a plan if Holliday can't be signed, and it involves all sorts of juggling that borders on disaster relief. It always seems like the Cards enter the offseason with the idea that Plan A is a pipe dream, that no matter what they try to do, they are doomed to come up short because someone else will want to spend more money.

But spending millions on Holliday is not exactly throwing money away. It's not like overspending on some mediocre, over-the-hill has-been. He is a 29-year-old all-star in his prime coming off a strong regular season where he hit for power and average for the Cardinals and created a threat that forced teams to pay for pitching around Pujols.

According to our Joe Strauss, the Cardinals presented Holliday's agent, Scott Boras, with a preliminary offer of a six-year, $96 million deal ($16 million annual average). But Boras told SI.com that he has fielded no offers from the Cardinals. In other words, Boras probably looked at the Cardinals' preliminary offer and said, "Pfffffft ... come back when you're serious."

Boras is the kind of negotiator who won't entertain offers until they reach his basement standard for the market he is setting. And apparently the Cardinals' offer is not close to what Boras is looking for with Holliday in years or money, particularly when Alfonso Soriano received an eight-year, $136 million contract ($17 million annual average) to sign with the Chicago Cubs three years ago.

At the very least, it's going to take Soriano-type money to get Holliday signed. Is he worth it? The Cardinals already answered that question when they auctioned off their farm system this summer. I still remember standing in front of the Busch Stadium dugout last July beside DeWitt and listening to him say, "We didn't make this deal with the intention of letting him go in the offseason."

I hope he remembers that conversation.