With a younger roster, who will emerge as the Cardinals’ clubhouse leader?

Clubhouse politics are not without their nuances and complications. In some ways, a baseball team functions the same as any other workplace, but every year, its shape and form can change based on where a team is in its competitive cycle.

The St. Louis Cardinals have wrestled with that reality in recent years.

“Our team was just all young guys,” Nolan Arenado said in February of 2024, meeting with reporters after he arrived at spring training. “I don’t mean this in a bad way, but they kind of overran the clubhouse, and usually the veterans run the clubhouse.”

Matt Carpenter and Brandon Crawford were signed as free agents as part of a strategy to alleviate some of those concerns and shift the balance of power back to the veterans. A year later, with the Cardinals advertising a reset and yet to make a single big league free agent signing, the tide has turned again. Prominent players see the change, but this time around, it seems to be a great deal more welcome.

“If you look at the talent, especially on the position player side, the young talent, those guys have to, in my opinion, those guys have to take it over,” Sonny Gray said Saturday from the podium at Winter Warm-Up. “It turns into, it’s their clubhouse. Now it’s their team, and we as older guys, me and myself and whoever is here, I think it’s our job to lead them and to mentor them, but to let them spread their wings and let them fly and kind of like, like I said, let them take it over.”

It’s never as simple as flipping a switch. Whether or not clubhouse leadership is perceptible from outside the room is a complicated question without a clear answer, and it’s of course true that a winning clubhouse will invariably be perceived as more in sync than a losing clubhouse.

Even still, chemistry matters. The connection matters. And the environment in which young players are encouraged to flourish and express themselves – rather than an environment in which they may feel obligated to stifle themselves – is one which lends itself toward creating the kind of long term successes the Cardinals are pledging to seek in the middle of their reset.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a young guy’s clubhouse,” shortstop Masyn Winn said Sunday after being asked about Gray’s comments. “When you’ve got vets like Sonny in there, it’s, you know, what he says really goes. But to be able to follow some leaders like that, it’s going to be fun for the young guys…I think it’s just gonna be a lot of hungry, hungry people that want to go out there and compete.”

Winn, firmly at the center of attention in the midst of the weekend’s festivities, arrived for his media conference wearing the jersey the St. Louis Blues recently wore in the NHL’s Winter Classic, emblazoned with his name and number. He recently attended his first NHL game and received a warm reception from the crowd, deepening his connection to a city where he’s imagined winning a championship as well as spending his entire career.

In the summer, at least. The Houston native is still a little reticent about the cold.

He’s also at the center of a group of players who have largely climbed through the system together. Pitcher Zack Thompson, the team’s first round pick in 2019, mused that he was among the last players still standing in the organization of his generation, seeing already a wave of young talent coming behind him years before he reaches his 30th birthday. There are certainly young players on the way, and the design of the winter for the Cardinals is to provide those players an opportunity to perform – at lower salaries, of course, than their veteran counterparts.

“We have a lot of guys that have played a lot of baseball together throughout the levels and throughout the years,” first baseman Luken Baker said. “I think we mesh really well, and I think I think we’re going to win a lot of ball games. I think we have a really good team. We’re really talented, and we have a lot of hungry young players that are ready to prove it.”

That refrain has been repeated throughout the weekend. Countless young players – Baker, Winn, Brendan Donovan, Pedro Pagés and others among them – spoke about the desire to tune out expectations and allow themselves to perform.

Whether or not they’re ready for it, and whether or not it alters whatever clubhouse chemistry has been built over the preceding years, that change has been locked in by virtue of the Cardinals letting veteran free agents walk without pursuing any replacements on the open market. Should they achieve their goal of trading Nolan Arenado, that trend will only deepen. Winn may not believe it’s fully a young player’s clubhouse just yet, but the Cardinals are determined to push it that direction and create opportunities to prove that the players they have are ready for that responsibility.

“It’s hard to establish identity until you really get kicked in the mouth,” Donovan said. “I think that’s when you get through adversity. That’s when you really find out what your group looks like.

“We’ve got a lot of very talented, very hungry and motivated players,” he added, “and this group can be molded however we want to. But I think it’s important to let them know that they can be themselves…If you are comfortable and you care about someone, and you’ve invested in someone, then you’re going to get the most out of them. And that’s the process that I want to take.”