Chaim Bloom will replace John Mozeliak as the Cardinals' president of baseball operations after 2025

The Cardinals held a press conference today with chairman Bill DeWitt Jr., club president Bill DeWitt III, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak and consultant Chaim Bloom. DeWitt Jr. announced at the press conference that Bloom would take over Mozeliak's POBO role after 2025 and has signed a five-year contract. Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat was among those who relayed the details (X-Links). According to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (X-Link), that contract begins in 2026. Mozeliak adds that he will make day-to-day decisions through 2025, but long-term decisions will involve bloom and ownership, according to Jones (X-Link ). Additionally, Michael Girsch is no longer General Manager, his title has now been changed to Vice President of Special Projects. According to Goold (X-Link), Mozeliak expects player salaries to decline.

There has been a lot of talk in recent days that major changes are coming to the front office. A week ago, Jones reported that some notable developments would be announced at today's press conference. Around the same time, USA Today's Bob Nightengale had reported that Bloom was likely being considered for a larger role. A few days later, The Athletic's Katie Woo provided more details, pointing out that Bloom would be overhauling the club's player development. As part of this overhaul, the club planned to redirect resources away from the major league roster and toward improving the minor league pipeline. Over the weekend, Nightengale continued to report on the club, pointing out that the salary cut could lead to right-handers Sonny Gray Settlement in the trading block. Meanwhile, a report from Goold agreed with Woo's information and noted that the club planned to focus on player development in the long term. Woo himself added another report indicating that the club was planning to move on from the long-time first baseman Paul Goldschmidt.

Today's announcements are all consistent with that reporting, but take it a step further. Although no one is using words like “remodeling” or “retooling” or anything similar, there seems to be a general understanding that the club will focus less on results in the immediate present and more on long-term development – temporary and/or or sustainable roster structure.

For most of this century, the Cardinals have had a strong track record of finding and developing young talent. That allowed them to generally produce strong results on the field, despite never being one of the biggest spenders in the league. From 2000 to present, they have missed the playoffs just nine times and suffered defeat just twice.

In recent years, however, this cutting-edge technology seems to have become somewhat dulled. From 2000 to 2015, they only missed the playoffs twice in a row, in 2007 and 2008. But that came between two World Series titles in 2006 and 2011. From 2016 to 2024, the club missed the playoffs five times. Of their four postseason appearances from 2019 to 2022, three ended in losses in the Wild Card round. While the club recovered somewhat from a losing season in 2023 and hit over .500 in 2024, it did so with a good portion of the roster consisting of expensive veterans in their mid-30s. These include Goldschmidt, Gray, Nolan Arenado, Lance Lynn, Kyle Gibson And Miles Mikolas.

According to recent reports leading up to today's conference, decision-makers appear to have concluded that they have been hampered by realigning their focus on the major league roster, which has hurt the club's player development pipeline. In recent years there have been players like Randy Arozarena, Adolis Garcia, Zac Gallen and others who thrived after leaving the organization. Some of the club's young talents now like it Dylan Carlson, Jordan Walker, Nolan Gorman and others struggled to live up to expectations.

Every organization will have some of these flaws, but it appears that the club recognizes that it needs to change its scoring rate in order to succeed. Since this is a mid-tier club that doesn't typically sign top free agents, good player development is pretty important to knocking out winning ball clubs.

More will follow.