Chaim Bloom! He really does exist! Just kidding. But it was good to see him formally introduced as the Cardinals president of baseball operations.
I thought Bloom made a good impression, as he easily (but politely) swatted away the predictable softball questions lobbed from the friendly media congregation. Boston, the site of his previous front-office leadership assignment, must have seemed a million miles away. No more shark attacks, Chaim! This is a much safer space.
Observations:
1. Bloom never used the word “rebuild” to describe his plans to restore and return the Cardinals to the elite level occupied by this historically prestigious franchise for much of the last 30 years under chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. There was an obvious strategy in Bloom’s approach to his first public appearance in his new job. And I get that.
2. And while I would have appreciated more transparency about the hard work ahead, and the sacrifices that will be part of it – you know, the rebuild gasp! – I understood Bloom’s choice here. In what is actually a compliment to DeWitt’s distinguished performance as the team’s owner since 1996, Cardinals fans aren’t familiar with rebuilding.
3. Until recently, this wasn't necessary in St. Louis. This rebuild thing is something the weak franchises have to do. Not the Cardinals. Not for a couple of generations, at least.
4. Rebuild? What’s that? Is that the stuff the Pirates and White Sox have to do? We don’t do rebuilds in this baseball town. I don’t want to hear about a rebuild. We’re the Cardinals. We’re the Best Fans In Baseball.”
5. I do believe Bloom was sensitive to this, which is smart. Because the word rebuild is often misapplied. Too many fans, in all markets, associate “rebuilding” with some kind of nuclear holocaust that will wipe out the sports landscape and force the baseball team (and fans) to suffer through a sequence of five or six seasons of 95-loss, or 100-loss baseball.
6. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way – even though the Cubs, Astros, Orioles and Tigers opted for the extreme version of a rebuild: tear it all down, blow it all up, clear away the rubble, sweep away the ashes, and methodically lay a brand new, debris-free foundation. It worked for the Cubs and the Astros, but the Tigers and Orioles have yet to win a pennant.
7. Some franchises avoid putting any type of rebuilding plan in place, stubbornly believing they can fix the problems with a few moves here and there.
To use a couple of random examples: after winning two consecutive World Series in the early 1990s, the Blue Jays failed to make the postseason from 1995 through 2014. That’s a 20-year absence. The Phillies – frequently praised for “trying to win” – did not make the postseason from 2012 through 2021.
8. Bloom and DeWitt seem to have settled on a pragmatic approach to rebuilding. Go with a raging inferno plan? No. The “let’s try to please the fans by spending our way back to health” plan? Hell, no. That’s how the Cardinals foolishly got themselves into this mess.
9. This will be more of a focused, targeted, case-by-case, piece-by-piece method that won’t freak out alarmed fans. There will be selective, disciplined spending. There will be more money poured into the player-development operation. There will be sensible offloads of players that are still under team control for multiple seasons but won’t be offered contract extensions for any number of reasons. It could be age, or the early signs of decline, or being part of a positional logjam, or being deemed too costly to sign. These Cards-controlled assets that have value – but no long-term future in St. Louis – will be traded for prospect capital that could pay off bigly in two or three years.
10. Bloom will make that a priority at the major-league level: cashing in tradeable assets. The No. 1 priority will be establishing a consistent flow of good talent in the pipeline from the minors to the majors. Bloom was a key part of the Tampa Bay front office that has made this personnel system work for a long time. And Bloom’s best work in Boston came in the area of draft-development. He rebuilt the farm system, and some of his draft picks are part of the revival that put the Red Sox into the playoffs this season. And Boston traded multiple players drafted by Bloom in the prospect package that netted ace starting pitcher Garret Crochet in a deal with the White Sox.
Even though Bloom didn’t go with the “rebuilding” verbiage on Tuesday, his messaging was finessed in a way that made the point and disclosed the plan – but without frightening the townsfolk or causing breathless, headline-seeking media to set their hair on fire
And the disciplined Bloom stayed on point.
It was well done.
Some examples:
— “We have talent here.We have more talent coming. We have some of the makings of that core, but we need more. And so our top priority will be to build our talent base for the long term. That may mean hard decisions and short-term sacrifices, but to get where we want to go.
We can't take shortcuts and we won't.”
(Translation: we think we have a head start on the rebuild … but the rebuild will proceed as planned.)
— “We will always want to win. We will hunt moves and decisions that allow us to do that right now, too. As long as they also serve our ultimate goal. But when we have to choose between short-term gratification and our bigger goal of contending consistently, we will choose the long-term.”
(Translation: the Cardinals will smartly cherry-pick opportunities that can help them win games in the here and the now – but let’s not get carried away. Unlike what you’ve been seeing here, we aren’t going to keep burning payroll on mediocre starting pitchers who don’t deliver any real impact – and will only slow down the rebuild instead of speeding up the rebuild.)
— “We will make moves with that ultimate (long-term) goal in mind, because simply put, that’s where this organization needs to be.”
(Translation: friends, this is the gentle way of telling you, once again, that this is a rebuild. And we are confident it will work.”)
— What about a timetable? Bloom wasn’t going to get pinned down on that one. He won’t go there. But he made a good point that wasn’t based on fantasy or the desire to gaslight the fans.
“Oftentimes when you're disciplined in following a longer-term strategy, you not only get there, more quickly, but you reap short-term rewards along the way,” he said. “I've experienced that everywhere I've been, and we saw flashes of it here in 2025 too. Now our strategy is long-term.”
(Translation: if we do this the right way, we may get back to being a contender sooner than you think. We’ve already made strides in adding some exciting young talent and more is coming. Let’s keep going.”)
— There was the Pep Talk to rally the fans: “We won't concede anything, and we will always compete. How we work, how we scout, how we train, how we develop, and how we play, those are things we control and that we get to decide every day, and we will get after them with intent. I'm energized and fired up to continue the work that we've begun with my teammates.”
(Translation: please trust us, and we won’t let you down.)
In Chaim we trust?
I can only speak for myself.
I trust Chaim Bloom.
But as is the case with everyone who has a job with so much responsibility – Bloom will have to maintain that trust over time.
As for now, Cardinals fans … welcome to the rebuild. Just go with it, OK? This is something new that will be a refreshing change from the rot.
This rebuild won’t be as painful or frustrating as the last three seasons of watching a team that ranked 22nd in the majors in winning percentage. And this was a team that had a garish minus 222 run differential over the three lost years. The old and moldy way wasn’t working. The Bloom way is the better way to go.
As for Oli Marmol returning as manager, I did a video on Bloom’s decision, and it should be online soon, and you can access it here at STL Sports Central.
Thanks for reading …
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast each week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here at STL Sports with his weekly appearance on the Randy Karraker Show.