Cardinals decide to shelve shortstop for the season
Somewhere in the midst of his warm-up routine at American Family Field on Friday night, St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Masyn Winn crossed a hard-to-define rubicon and tipped over into the risk of doing more harm than good. His troublesome right knee was unable to allow him to perform for what was a third consecutive game, this one immediately following an off day, and the Cardinals reached a conclusion that they have been trying to avoid for weeks.
Winn will be placed on the injured list with a minor tear in his meniscus of that knee, manager Oli Marmol said after an 8-2 loss in the series opener. His sophomore season, likely to end in his first career Gold Glove, comes to an official conclusion with 14 games remaining on the schedule.
“His hope, really, at the end of the day, was to get back home and play in front of the home fans one more time,” Marmol said. “He was really aiming for that. We were trying to do everything possible to get him there, but it’s just not recovering the same way it was recovering early on in the month. So we made the decision, and he’ll be done for the year.”
Both Winn and the team have previously acknowledged that he will require arthroscopic surgery to repair the tear, and neither has expressed any concern that it will affect his availability for the start of spring training in 2026. Winn was not available for comment on Friday evening.
Thomas Saggese will take over at shortstop for the Cardinals over the season’s last two weeks.
“It’s been very impressive to see him go out and make every play, and the consistency of his abilities,” Saggese said. “It’s been super, super impressive just to see the consistency of spectacular plays that he makes, and then on top of that, just the consistency of routine plays that he makes. Makes it look easy, too. And you forget that he’s doing it on a bum knee, too.
“I think he’s the best fielder in the league.”
The numbers tend to agree with Saggese, as Winn committed just three errors in 551 chances this season, the same number he committed in a mere 147 chances in a brief big league cameo in 2023. His 22 outs above average are tied for the Major League lead with Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals, and are three clear of the next highest total for any other National League infielder, third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes of the Cincinnati Reds. He’s five better than the next best NL shortstop, Atlanta’s Nick Allen.
“He’s the best shortstop in the game,” Marmol said.
While some of his offensive rates did take a dip on a year-over-year basis, it’s difficult not to attribute some of that slippage – his slugging percentage fell from .416 last year to .363 this year – to injury. He was batting .270 with a .389 slugging percentage at the conclusion of play on July 29, and then was able to compile just a .546 OPS over his remaining 32 games while fighting through pain on nearly every swing that torqued his back knee.
Perhaps the only thing that has any risk of separating Winn from his first career Gold Glove is the amount of bulk innings he was able – or unable – to pile up while fighting through injury. Winn’s total of 1107 ⅔ innings at short would be the lowest winning total for any NL shortstop since Colorado’s Troy Tulowitzki won the award with 1065 innings in 2010, though not the lowest for any Cardinal; Ozzie Smith recorded just 1065 ⅓ inning en route to the award in 1984.
Given the distance between Winn and the field, and given that his season ends with a representative sample already recorded and due to injury, his relative innings scarcity seems unlikely to significantly hamper his chances. Perhaps at worst there is some drama injected into the process, but it should still end with his adding impressive hardware to his trophy case, and becoming the first St. Louis shortstop to win a Gold Glove since new Cardinals Hall of Famer Édgar Rentería did so in back-to-back seasons in 2002 and 2003.
In a season with the central premise of providing sufficient runway to young players to determine whether and how their futures fit in with the path of a resetting organization, Winn did seemingly all within his power to solidify his place as a part of that future. As a thought exercise, when imagining which players on the current team might be a part of the next truly championship-caliber club in St. Louis, Winn’s name is undoubtedly at the top of the list.
It is not the conclusion to a season that anyone involved desired, but it’s not a conclusion that takes any shine off the impressive journey required to arrive where it did.
“There’s a lot of growth there,” Marmol said in praising Winn’s mentality. “That’s important when you’re looking at, evaluating, and growing your own dudes from within, and building around it.”
