Winn joins Smith, Renteria as Cardinals’ golden shortstops
There were times throughout the 2025 season at which it wasn’t clear that Masyn Winn was going to be able to gut it out and stay on the field.
The St. Louis Cardinals remained steadfastly confident that their shortstop wouldn’t do any additional damage to the meniscus in his right knee, and the team and its training staff stood steadfastly by his side in his ongoing attempts to post as much as possible.
Those efforts were rewarded on Sunday night, as Winn was awarded the National League Gold Glove at shortstop. It’s the first such award of his career, and he is the first Cardinals shortstop to win since Cardinals Hall of Famer Edgar Renteria won in back-to-back seasons in 2002 and 2003.
The only other Cardinals winner at the position is legendary shortstop Ozzie Smith, who took home consecutive awards from 1980 through 1992, the first two of which were won with the San Diego Padres.
“It’d be great. It’d be fantastic,” Winn said in September when asked about what winning the award would mean to him. “That’s something I really wanted to win last year. I had too many errors for it. I’m hoping that I gave myself the best chance. That would be amazing.”
If errors were the issue in 2024, that issue was addressed with a vengeance in 2025. After 18 errors last season, Winn cut that number down to just three this season, despite playing 1107 ⅔ innings at short and handling 501 defensive chances. He played a two-month stretch between June 19 and August 19 in which he did not commit a single official miscue, seemingly locking in his victory in the process.
Victor Scott II, a finalist for the same award in center field, lost to Chicago’s Pete Crow-Armstrong. The other finalists alongside Winn were Atlanta’s Nick Allen and Mookie Betts, a finalist in his first full season at short for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
For Winn, the award is not only a vindication of his year-long fight to stay on the field, but also a demonstration of his high level of skill even as he was playing with built in limitations. Winn has been a finalist in each of his two full big league seasons, and he finished behind Colorado’s Ezequiel Tovar in 2024.
This year, he was not to be denied. The Gold Glove is awarded following a vote of managers and coaches (who are not allowed to vote for players on their own teams), as well as the defensive index rankings published by the Society for American Baseball Research.
Winn and Allen finished tied atop the SABR rankings, well ahead of Betts. Betts was well behind the other two by most commonly utilized defensive metrics, but his transition to shortstop at this late point in his career, and his success in doing so, undoubtedly held significant weight with the voting coaches who account for 75% of the total score accumulated by the finalists.
By most of MLB’s own numbers, though, Winn was undeniable. He was second among all shortstops with 16 Statcast runs prevented and 21 outs above average, trailing in both cases an AL counterpart, Kansas City’s Bobby Witt Jr. By fielding run value, Winn again trailed only Witt, building a comfortable lead over Allen and Betts, the latter of whom was just the eighth best NL shortstop in the category.
Despite being able to stay on the field for most of the season – and, crucially, for long enough to rack up enough innings to be a serious contender for the Gold Glove – Winn did eventually have surgery to repair his meniscus at the end of September. Both the player and the team have said they expect him to be ready at full capacity for spring training.
The victory also snapped a two-year-long cold stretch for the Cardinals, who hadn’t won any Gold Gloves since Nolan Arenado (third base) and Brendan Donovan (utility) did so in 2022, alongside winning the overall team award that same year. Both of those players may well be traded this winter as the Cardinals continue to work to turn over their roster to a younger core who they believe can lead contention for years to come.
Winn is perhaps at the very heart of that core, arguably the team’s most essential player who has already reached the big leagues, and a strong candidate for a significant contract extension in the coming months. Despite a slight down tick in offensive numbers that was undoubtedly related to his knee injury, the team believes he has many years to come of posting superb defensive numbers to go along with what could well be a top-notch offensive profile.
At 23, he is the youngest Cardinals shortstop to win a Gold Glove. That creates an early, strong foundation of success on which he – and certainly the team – are counting on the ability to build.
This story was originally published November 2, 2025 at 8:16 PM.
