Chaim Bloom will take over as president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals when longtime leader John Mozeliak’s contract expires at the end of the 2025 season.
The club’s top brass announced the change in a press conference at Busch Stadium on Monday.
“There's so much opportunity for us to make positive change," Bloom said. "I've heard over the course of the year some really good ideas come from within our organization. I've got some ideas from my own experiences. We're going to have new ideas come into the organization and really figure out, in all areas, how we can make this as good as it can be.”
Bloom joined the organization in January as a special adviser to Mozeliak, charged with improving the team’s player development. He previously served as general manager for the Tampa Bay Rays and director of baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox. Bloom signed a five-year contract to lead the Cardinals’ baseball operations.
Mozeliak has been in a similar role with the organization since 2007, after joining the scouting department in 1995. The team has enjoyed great success during his run, winning two National League pennants and six division titles and making two wild card appearances. The Cardinals won the World Series in 2011.
“When you think about your own legacy and how you want to leave something,” Mozeliak said, “I'm certainly hopeful that it will be left in a really solid place when I do step down next year.”
A lackluster 2023 season saw the Cardinals post a losing record, and this year the team improved to 83 wins and 79 losses but again missed the playoffs. By late season, wide expanses of empty seats became a common sight at Busch Stadium.
The coming switch-up at the top of baseball operations is part of an organization-wide examination of how it does business, team President Bill DeWitt III said.
“This is something that we haven’t really done in a long, long time, or at least in our tenure. We're looking at different ways to market the product and the experiences of being down here. We’re looking at every aspect of the operation, really. Not just on the baseball side, but on the business side,” said DeWitt.
The team will spend less on payroll in 2025 compared to this year, he added, as more resources move to player development in hopes of nurturing more homegrown stars. He said the team is working on a system for fans to watch future Cardinals games, for a fee, on a mobile app.
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