Cardinals shuffle front office to set the stage for leadership change after 2025 season

Long resistant to the idea that their passionate fan base would support a turn away from a day-to-day goal of winning the World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals announced a new path forward on Monday that will nonetheless be helmed in the short term by familiar faces.

President of baseball operations John Mozeliak will return for the 2025 season in that role, though it will be his last. The Cardinals have agreed to a five-year contract with Chaim Bloom to succeed Mozeliak in that role, beginning with the 2026 season. In 2025, Bloom will head up a revamping of the team’s player development apparatus, including a new complex in Jupiter, Fla. which will see a groundbreaking in April 2025.

Bloom, 41, was formerly the chief baseball officer in both Boston and Tampa Bay. He spent this past season auditing each of the organization’s affiliates as well as making contributions to major league strategy, and was long considered the top candidate to take the helm from Mozeliak next winter.

“I’m feeling thankful today,” Bloom said, singling out the DeWitt family, Mozeliak, and his wife and children. “More than anything, the remarkable success this organization enjoyed for much of the past two plus decades was fueled by its homegrown talent pipeline. This year, I saw some of the reasons why. I saw the pride in what’s been accomplished here over the years, the passion for teaching the game, the care for the organization, for what it stands for, and especially for our players, and I also saw in many of our staff a hunger to learn, to grow, to get better, to change.

“The competition in this area of our industry has been absolutely relentless over the past decade. It takes boldness and humility to get on top and to stay there. And if you stand still and you rest on your memorials for even a moment, you get beaten.”

General manager Mike Girsch was removed from that position and reassigned as a vice president of special projects. Mozeliak said that he will handle the day-to-day operational responsibilities of the general manager over the winter and for the 2025 season, but that, “anything that’s going to affect the organization in a long term or meaningful way, I will definitely be consulting with ownership and Chaim to make sure that they feel like it’s the right decision.”

Manager Oli Marmol was also retained for 2025, though there will be changes to his coaching staff. The Cardinals declined to outline those changes on Monday, but none of hitting coach Turner Ward, assistant hitting coach Brandon Allen, and first base coach Stubby Clapp, game planning coach Packy Elkins and assistant pitching coach Julio Rangel are currently under contract for next season, according to a report by Katie Woo in The Athletic.

Long heralded as one of the prime development organizations in the industry, the Cardinals in recent years have fallen back to and then behind the pack of more modern clubs. The aftermath of the pandemic saw the team neglect to return its minor league staffing to appropriate levels, and continuing struggles in remaking the flagship minor league complex have impeded the use of proper facilities now considered commonplace throughout baseball.

The tradeoff with those investments will clearly come from the major league payroll, which Mozeliak said he would, “anticipate seeing…go down.” FanGraphs estimates that the Cardinals had a big league payroll commitment of roughly $183 million in 2024, a slight uptick from 2023.

The Cardinals currently have five players with guaranteed payroll commitments of at least $10 million for 2025, with Ryan Helsley certain to become the sixth in his final year of salary arbitration. Any or all of those six players – Helsley, Nolan Arenado, Willson Contreras, Sonny Gray, Steven Matz and Miles Mikolas – could find themselves dealt before the season begins.

Mozeliak declined to delve into in depth roster plans, and also declined to express what he felt would be reasonable on-field expectations for the Cardinals competitively next season. “I’d prefer not to answer that because I don’t know what our roster is going to look like today,” he said.

None of the four members of the organization at the podium on Monday – Bloom, Mozeliak, chairman Bill DeWitt, Jr. and team president Bill DeWitt III – used the word “rebuild” to describe the process the Cardinals are currently undertaking. Both DeWitt III and Mozeliak pushed back on that assessment, preferring instead to call the process a “refresh.”

“I wouldn’t use that word primarily because of what I said…about our excitement about the young group that we have,” DeWitt III said. “I usually equate the term ‘rebuild’ to be stripping it down to the core, [using] replacement level players, and start from scratch. I don’t think that’s what this is.”

Whatever revenue challenges the Cardinals are balancing through struggles with local television rights and a dip in fan attendance, the decision has been made to invest a greater percentage of the pie into player development. Mozeliak estimated an increase in player development spending of eight to 12 percent for 2025, but cautioned that a dollar or even a percentage figure would be difficult to solidify without advance knowledge of the team’s revenue report.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on drafting and developing our own players,” DeWitt Jr. said. “It’s clear that we need to make significant changes to get back to this model. Our baseball decisions going forward will focus on developing our pipeline of players, giving our young core every opportunity to succeed at the major league level.”

The timeline for that success, at the start of a major turn and consequential winter for the franchise, was not clarified.