Before he braved frigid temperatures and braced for a fan reception that has chilled, longtime Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak took a look down from his Busch Stadium office window Saturday morning and saw something heartwarming.

New Cardinals starter Sonny Gray and his family members were making their way into their first Winter Warm-up.

“I was thinking,” Mozeliak said. “That’s got to be pretty cool for him.”

Can confirm.

The pitcher Mozeliak hoped to draft out of Vanderbilt in 2011 and followed closely since was here in St. Louis wearing the team logo and carrying a shared admiration for his new team.

Accompanied by his sons and wife, Jessica, who encouraged Gray to hear the Cardinals out when they entered his free agency later than some, the Grays were eager participants in the team’s unofficial season opener.

Gray arrived with homework about both the Cardinals and cardinals completed. He’s been connecting with new teammates in conversations ahead of spring training, including multiple chats with catcher Willson Contreras. He’s been reading up on the bird, lowercase.

Gray’s father died in a car accident when Gray was just a freshman in high school. As some of you know, but Gray did not learn until just recently, it is believed an encounter with a cardinal can represent a visit from a lost loved one.

“That holds a place in my heart,” Gray said. “You start finding little things about it that make it mean that much more to you, that make it that much more special to you.”

Gray’s youngest son, Declan, retired early for a nap but Gunnar, 8, was still going strong in his Cardinals hoodie, hot dog in hand, by the time his father appeared in the media room. Father and son shared they had recently been haggling about a baseball-card trade. Dad is trying to acquire Gunnar’s Willson Contreras card, even offering a signed Sonny Gray card in return. Gunnar is holding strong, demanding more for Dad’s new batterymate.

“It shows a commitment to winning,” Gray said, not about his son’s card-swapping negotiation tactics, but about the Cardinals’ decision to target Gray as one of three prongs in a rotation fortification that asks proven veterans Gray, Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn to help the Cardinals stabilize a pitching crisis that sabotaged last season’s last-place team.

“An organization that is not content with losing, rebuilding, doing any of these things,” Gray continued. “Trying to put the best product on the field for the fans and the organization to win, year in and year out.”

Not to put too much pressure on Gray here, considering he’s already being asked to not only produce another All-Star season worthy of Cy Young consideration and help toughen up a Cardinals pitching staff that trended too soft last season, but he’s also perhaps the player who could be most influential in making that Saturday statement he made about the Cardinals’ steadfastness become true again and remain so.

The Cardinals continue to refute the notion they are positioned to turn toward some sort of refresh, rebuild or whatever you want to call it if this upcoming season fails to launch similar to last season’s last-place team.

But they can’t and won’t deny that there are signs that suggest the opportunity to pivot, if it’s forced upon them.

Signs include ...

Many organizations with a team built like this one would, if struggling this upcoming season, trade off players like Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado and perhaps some of the just-added veteran arms, in order to expedite a turn toward youth.

The Cardinals insist, and did so again Saturday, that they don’t do slate-clearing rebuilds. But they didn’t like to identify as trade-deadline sellers either, and last season’s regrettable reality made it so.

What makes the Gray signing so interesting and so important is that it’s the team’s biggest ($75 million guaranteed) and longest investment of this offseason, and that it was given to a player who most represents the organization’s resistance to the notion the Cardinals are prioritizing flexibility in case 2024 goes sideways. It’s also telling about the team and the pitcher that the Cardinals are so publicly trusting a first-time Cardinal to become a key catalyst in helping a pitching staff rediscover a tenacity the Cardinals loved in Gray because they used to see it in themselves.

He’s up for the challenge, already eager to put a thorn in the heavyweight Dodgers’ side in the Cardinals’ season-opening series in Los Angeles.

“I’ve heard, ‘The Cardinal Way, The Cardinal Way, The Cardinal Way,’ my whole career,” Gray said. “And everyone’s ‘Cardinal Way’ might have a little different meaning. But the guts of it, and the foundation of it, is still there. And the foundation of it is still very, very strong. It gets tweaked, right? But everything gets tweaked. Being able to put your own stamp on something is something I look forward to being able to do, but I’m not doing it by myself.”

The more you get to know Gray, the more you find yourself wishing, like Mozeliak, that Gray could have started here from the start.

You also feel better about Gray leading a staff that will likely be the deciding factor between a rebound and something that could look a lot like the Cardinals’ version of a rebuild.