Chaim Bloom has announced the Cardinals' focus for the 2025-2026 offseason

Chaim Bloom is wasting no time in getting down to business to fix the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals' new president of baseball operations was hired to bring his modern baseball approach to the team and remedy the numerous pitfalls that the Cardinals have recently found themselves mired in. After a season in which Bloom was largely absent from the public eye as he worked behind the scenes in John Mozeliak's last year with the team, Bloom is now unquestionably the one pulling the levers of the Cardinals. Now, as we head into the offseason, Bloom has announced his plans for the next phase of revitalizing the team.

The Cardinals will be adding to their professional and international scouting department for 2026.

According to Katie Woo's latest article in The Athletic (subscription required), Bloom plans to add several new positions to the team's scouting department, including an external hire for the head of the professional scouting department. The Cardinals' seven current professional scouts will all return on one-year contracts, and Randy Flores and Moises Rodriguez will retain their roles as assistant general managers.

It should comfort Cardinals fans to see Bloom making good on his words from his introductory press conference about adding new staff members in an attempt to get the team back on track. Many other teams have chosen to traverse the opposite path, cutting scouts and relying more on programs. Bloom said there needs to be a combination of both to make a successful team, and a 2024 article from J.J. Cooper of Baseball America (subscription required) mentioned that teams letting go of their scouts were losing an edge. Cooper gave an example of how pitch modeling still struggles to quantify the deception of pitchers' changeups and that scouts can help fill that gap.

Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. also appears to be following through on his promises to give Bloom what he needs to help the Cardinals improve through the draft-and-develop process. Last season, the team made sweeping changes to its player development and analytics departments, and Woo suggested that the Cardinals may not be finished on that front.

The Cardinals have already shown a drastically different approach to the draft under Bloom, moving away from the pitch-to-contact hurlers and seeking strikeout stuff instead, and this scouting revamp may serve as the next step in unearthing more gems who could develop into stars to help the Cardinals claw back into contention.