It might happen at the supermarket 30 minutes away from his ranch or at breakfast joint nearby when a neighbor or friend of a friend starts quizzing Matt Carpenter about his profession and inevitably asks what he has been unable to answer.
"Baseball, huh? What position do you play?" they'll say.
"It's actually a great question," he'll reply. "I don't know."
Almost immediately after the Cardinals traded for six-time All-Star and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, Carpenter unpacked his Rawlings infielder's glove, enlisted a ranch hand and started going daily to a nearby high school field to take grounders at third base. For the first time in his career, the Cardinals' leadoff hitter and last season's leading hitter has a home before the holidays.
The annual questions of what he'll play when or where he'll hit now already have their resolutions. The hot corner is his.
The leadoff spot awaits him. The certainty is a gift.
"First time it solidifies a spot for me," Carpenter said this past week from his home in Texas. "It's uncharted territory. I've become accustomed to going into the season being prepared for all of it, for anything. It's baseball, so things can happen, things can change. I look at this as the chance to focus."
Carpenter, 33, has been an All-Star at three infield positions, and since his last extended season at third base, he's started at least 140 games at first or third and 61 at second, moving around to accommodate the Cardinals' roster. In 2018, Carpenter appeared in 156 games, yet didn't have more than 75 starts at a single position. It has been three years since he called his original position his everyday position, and he moved off third in part because the Cardinals wanted a super-utility fielder and they had a slicker defender in Jedd Gyorko.
With Goldschmidt, a Gold Glove-winner at first, the Cardinals are comfortable shifting Carpenter back to third because they feel the consistent reps -- which have already started in Glen Rose, Texas -- will help, and, as manager Mike Shildt said, "The metrics support it."
In 568 innings at third this past season, Carpenter had his best defensive season at that corner. According to Baseball Info Solutions, Carpenter's plus-6 Defensive Runs Saved ranked sixth in the majors and were three less than the NL leader. A minus-13 fielder at third in 2015, Carpenter improved to plus-5 this past season, according to Bill James Online. He was the only third baseman with fewer than 650 innings at the position and more than 30 "Out Of Zone" plays made, FanGraphs.com measured. He had 32.
"Really, I think that's a change in mindset," explained Carpenter. "I played that position more aggressively than I ever have. It was an aggressive mindset that played a role in all of it. I'm never going to whiz it over there with my arm, but if it's in my glove, I'll make the play."
At the urging of coaches Jose Oquendo and Oliver Marmol, Carpenter also moved off the line, farther to his left than he had played before. The metrics reveal the results as he went from a minus-7 fielder to his left in 2015 at third to a plus-7 this past season.
He said the message had been for years to "take away the lines" even if it limited his range by putting him closer to foul territory.
This season they moved him with a new directive.
"Take away the hits," Carpenter said.
Oquendo has already outfitted Carpenter with a regimen of fielding work before reporting to Jupiter, Fla., for spring training. The fielding guru sent Carpenter video clips on ways to improve footwork. Each one features Oquendo running through the drills so Carpenter can see the specific movements the coach wants and recreate them in Texas.
About two miles from Carpenter's home, Glen Rose High has a field turf ballfield that allows for true hops, and he'll grab a bucket of balls, his glove, and a cowboy to head there for workouts daily. The cowboy, Chance Knight, is a high school teammate, friend and former pitcher who runs Carpenter's ranch. In addition to farming, mowing, feeding, corralling and branding, Knight hits a mean fungo.
"He's a man of many hats," Carpenter said, before clarifying that he will take the cowboy hat off before practice. "He'll hop right off the tractor and sit on a bucket and flip balls for me to hit for 30 minutes. Three hours later he'll hop off the tractor, in cowboy boots and Wranglers, and he'll hit ground balls to me for an hour. I'm pretty lucky to have this setup."
What is driving the Cardinals' decision on where to put Carpenter's glove is of course the bats. Goldschmidt brings a perennial MVP candidate to the Cardinals' lineup, and his .925 OPS ranked second in the majors at first base. Carpenter's .983 OPS while playing first was first. Carpenter's production plays even better at third and allows some slack for his defense. His .897 overall OPS would have ranked fourth among NL third basemen, and his .374 on-base percentage would have edged Washington's Anthony Rendon to lead the position in the NL. Only Colorado's Nolan Arenado hit more homers at third base than Carpenter's 36.
Carpenter finished ninth in the MVP voting this past season and set career highs for homers (36), OPS (.897), extra-base hits (78) and slugging (.523). But he got to those numbers a lot like the Cardinals assigned his position -- inconsistent with occasional stretches of consistency. The stat profile Carpenter received from the Cardinals outlined where his advanced metrics landed compared to league average. One number that has been diminished by analytics but still matters to Carpenter is one that has shriveled the past two seasons: his average.
He's hit .250 this past two seasons, and he's seen his career average slip from .293 to .274 in four years.
"I feel like I can put together the season that I really have in there," Carpenter said. "The complete season. I feel there is a season in me with my skills that could be .300 (average), .400 (OBP), .500 (slugging). There's a way to build toward that."
With two young kids, Carpenter expected to spend Christmas Eve assembling toys. He recalled a Christmas morning when his family had finished all the gifts and one of his parents suggested maybe they forgot something -- out in the backyard. There stood a new basketball goal. Carpenter recalled "the drama, the surprise of it." The lineup card has had that feel for some time, too. If Carpenter wasn't starting a season (2017) with the intent to move out of the leadoff spot, he was starting a season (2013) at an unfamiliar position, second base, as unsure as anyone if it would work.
This past season, as he stirred from an April funk, Carpenter had a 10-game stretch that began with three starts at three positions, and when it included consecutive starts at the same infield spot, he never finished a game at that same one. He saw the positions listed and had to check his name twice.
No wonder he didn't have an answer when asked often about his job.
"I used to just go with 'infield,'" he said.
Now he can say third base, with certainty.
That does leave him, however, with a new question that he cannot answer: the location of his first baseman's glove.
"I don't even know where it is," he said. "It's in a bag somewhere around here."