The day before spring training officially begins, these Cardinals have started to stir

Lance Lynn drove two different vehicles around the St. Louis Cardinals’ spring training complex on Monday morning.

One was a golf cart on which he cruised to a set of pitching mounds among the back fields, and on which Ryan Helsley ran from the clubhouse just in time to hitch a ride. The other was a Barbie-pink-shaded, new model Ford Bronco, parked in the last space in the lot technically reserved for a team owner.

No official work today, technically, and his job is innings.

A day before pitchers and catchers are required to report to south Florida and two days before the team’s first scheduled official workout, Lynn and new staff ace Sonny Gray were among a large contingent of people gathered around those bullpen mounds to watch Helsley work through a less-than-full-intensity throwing session.

Manager Oliver Marmol, pitching coach Dusty Blake, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, and perhaps a half dozen others all watched Helsley throw to non-roster catcher Nick Raposo, and then most peeled off to continue their daily work.

Gray, for instance, slid over to a neighboring field for a long toss session with non-roster catcher Wade Stauss. It was hard not to be impressed by the precision with which his tosses were landing, though being too impressed by anything done on the field in the second week of February is rarely a wise decision.

Spring training is no longer about getting in shape but instead about hitting the accelerator for the season at the right pressure. The Cardinals may not need to stomp on the gas, but they surely need to get going with the right amount of urgency.

Matthew Liberatore took the mound not long after Helsley and breezed through his own work, notable only for the unusual quirk of pitching while wearing a left-handed catcher’s mitt. That was the result, he explained, of needing a little extra heft in his leather while doing separate exercises with plyometric balls before taking the mound.

And, he joked, it was helpful in the mid-morning Florida sun to have a little extra coverage for balls being returned in the general vicinity of his face. Can’t be too careful.

The slow trickle of arrivals to the complex on Monday will speed up Tuesday, the day on which all pitchers and catchers must arrive. Position players have until the following Monday, though many have already gotten to work.

New waiver acquisition Alfonso Rivas was scooping ground balls at first base as Tommy Edman tackled line drives shot directly at him in centerfield from an angled pitching machine; Edman was casually flipping the balls back to a pile or nudging them with his glove, a hindrance in part created by his continuing recovery from offseason wrist surgery.

Rivas was easy enough to spot, arriving with two equipment bags in tow emblazoned with Pittsburgh Pirates logos. Andrew Kittredge arrived carrying his Tampa Bay Rays bag; the rite of new gear usually follows not long after official check-ins and time spent getting to know the staff around the facility.

New relievers Ryan Fernandez and Nick Robertson, both formerly of the Boston Red Sox, arrived together and then paired off with each other as throwing partners. There’s plenty of time in the coming weeks to build up familiarity and comfort with new teammates, but in the short term, it makes sense for them to stick with what and who they know.

Some of the comfort at camp will be based in pretending like everything old is new again, and some pretending that new things are still old. Workers who spend the whole year in Florida described enthusiasm last summer when construction on the facility was set to begin. Players were permitted, if not outright encouraged, to kick off some of the demolition with baseball bats in hand. Then, begrudgingly, workers had to re-assemble everything as it was, as delays based around local politics pushed the construction project back at least a year.

It’s a camp where the Cardinals are eager to return things to how they used to be, even if nothing feels quite in its right place. It’s the first spring training after a last place finish, after all, since 1991. Those Cardinals recovered by 14 games to finish a respectable second place in their division, though under the previous playoff format, did not reach the postseason.

If these Cardinals get a 14-game bounce, they’ll almost certainly be playing in the Wild Card round. They were built with that sort of stable floor in mind, and with hopes it would be strong enough to bounce them somewhat higher.

For the bounce to come, with so much focus on consistency from the starting rotation, it will be Lynn, Gray and others required to drive the bus in that direction. Lynn, we have learned, is a versatile driver. For the first time in seven years, the Cardinals are counting on him to climb back behind the wheel.

As long as it comes with success, they won’t care much about the color of the conveyance.