Cardinals swipe 2 front office hires from rival clubs as Chaim Bloom rounds out team

More changes are coming to the St. Louis Cardinals front office, this time swiping two critical names from rival organizations.

Last offseason, the Cardinals found themselves overhauling their player development department, led by the hiring of assistant general manager Rob Cerfolio, and the staff he put in place beneath him in the area of player development and performance. Now, Chaim Bloom is expanding the Cardinals' scouting department, as Katie Woo and Chandler Rome of The Athletic are reporting that St. Louis has hired Joe Douglas to oversee the professional scouting department and Jacob Buffa as their international scouting director.

The Cardinals have hired Jacob Buffa and Joe Douglas to expand their front office

News broke a few weeks ago that Bloom planned to add additional roles to the Cardinals' scouting departments, a move that goes against the grain of other organizations that are downsizing or cutting the departments entirely. Woo detailed more of those coming changes in a piece yesterday for The Athletic, and now we are beginning to know some of the names that will flesh out the Cardinals' staff.

Buffa, who has ties to the area from attending Missouri State University and is the owner of Elite Baseball Academy, a baseball performance facility in St. Louis, was with the Houston Astros organization as the senior director of player development and performance science, and also served as a sports science analyst during his seven seasons with the Astros. His background in anatomy and human movement makes him a huge asset to the Cardinals organization as they look to gain an edge in player development, sports sciences, and biomechanics.

Douglas spent eight seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization and was most recently their head of player analysis. He also served in other capacities, like the assistant director of professional player valuation and senior quantitative analyst. Douglas will head the pro scouting staff under the guidance of assistant general manager and scouting director Randy Flores.

I discussed the previous reporting regarding the expansion of the Cardinals' front office with Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat on our most recent episode of Dealin' the Cards, and it was clear that Bloom has developed good relationships with general managers Flores and Moises Rodriguez, and these hires are intended to provide them additional support in the work they do.

As the Cardinals look to regain their edge in the industry, doubling down on hires like these and expanding their staff are great steps toward working their way back to the top. While there are a lot of issues fans can point to over the last five or so years in St. Louis, the lack of, or at least clunky, synergy from the Cardinals' scouting, player development, and player performance teams has stunted their ability to maximize talent. Bloom has spent the last year bringing cohesion to these areas, and now they can get to work on revamping the organization.