Chaim Bloom sees these 2 traits as Cardinals' identity moving forward

With John Mozeliak's departure from the St. Louis Cardinals, the organization is undergoing its first change in leadership in 18 years, and the significance of that is hard to overstate.

Yes, ownership remains the same, and the market that the Cardinals reside in funnels that into a certain style of operation, but regime changes typically happen fairly often in the game of baseball, so it is extremely rare to have one voice lead the organization for as long as the Cardinals have.

Chaim Bloom, who has taken the reins from Mozeliak after two years of serving as a consultant, brings in a wealth of knowledge and experience from his time running the Boston Red Sox and his over a decade-long run helping shape the Tampa Bay Rays into the machine they are now. Bloom's professional upbringing in a place like Tampa and his first run as the lead decision maker in a market like Boston have caused many to wonder how Bloom will operate while leading the Cardinals' baseball operations.

Alex Ferrario asked Bloom during a radio spot on 101 ESPN if there was any kind of identity he wanted the Cardinals to take on as he looks to lead them into this new era, and I found the two things he highlighted to be very telling of where he wants them to go.

"I'll give you a couple of things on that," Bloom said on 101 ESPN. "One of them is, in addition to what I just talked about, there is a lot that gets talked about. Are we about small ball? Are we about power? Look, the reality of it, we should just be about winning, and there's times for each of those. We can talk about small ball, and obviously, the legacy of the Cardinals has a lot of that, and there's plenty of conversation, which I understand, about this year's club, and hitting the ball over the fence is a pretty good way to score runs. So we should never be in a position where we are walking past certain types of players or where we don't have a club in our bag to try and get something done on the field.

To me, it's more about we need to be detail-oriented. What this organization has done historically really well is dominate details, and so those things add up. No one thinks of a three-run homer as a detail, but everything that went into the training that put the player in position to get there and hit that is a detail. The decision, perhaps, to let the player swing away, if it was correct in that instance rather than bunt or rather than give himself up to move runners, that is a detail, and if we dominate those details, we should get the results.

And then beyond that, again, like the identity of the team, some of that just comes out of your talent. I don't want to walk past talent just because it might not fit a particular profile. What I do want is, if you come here to play us, at the end of that series, you should be exhausted. I want us to be really hard to play against."

Chaim Bloom wants the Cardinals' identity to be detail-oriented and hard to play against

While the terms "detail-oriented" and "hard to play against" are vague and difficult to quantify, I really do believe those are two critical characteristics for the Cardinals to develop over the coming years.

First, as Bloom detailed in his answer, being seen as a detail-oriented organization is how you get a leg up on your competition. Obviously, they need to have talent, but how you maximize that talent each day can be the difference between a win and a loss, a Wild Card berth or division title, and ultimately, how deep they can go into October.

That mentality has to be commonplace among the front office, support staff, coaches, and players across the board. If the Cardinals maximize everything they can when it comes to player evaluation and acquisition, player development and performance, putting players in the right positions to succeed, and the players on the field attack each day with that same attention to detail, the whole can become greater than the sum of its parts.

A lot of talk is happening right now about the success the Los Angeles Dodgers continue to have, and while their financial advantage is something that only a few organizations can rival, it's their attention to detail that has truly allowed them to separate themselves from the rest of the league. They use every avenue possible to improve their ball club and get the most out of the players they have, and it has allowed them to become the juggernaut that we know them to be.

The Milwaukee Brewers, who have become the class of the National League Central, have proven that being detail-oriented can allow you to reach heights that their limitations shouldn't allow them to. The Cardinals consistently outspend the Brewers year after year, and yet it is Milwaukee that continues to win division titles, identify and develop pitching better than almost anyone, continue to raise up quality position players, and has a great farm system to support them.

Bloom saw the power of this firsthand while leading in Tampa Bay; he sees the fruit of that labor being brought to fruition with how the Boston Red Sox are set up today, and he's now aiming to get the Cardinals to set the industry standard in the future.

While being detail-oriented is something people would have raved about the Cardinals for being in the early 2010s, so would have been the idea that they were hard to play against. Think about those teams from 2011-2015. They were the kings of the comeback; they exhausted opposing teams, and they consistently found themselves in the final four teams left standing year after year.

There are elements of that mentality present with Oliver Marmol's club now, but Bloom wants to see that become even more true of this team in the years to come. That doesn't just mean the club should embody that at the major league level though, it means that prospects up and down the system should be ready to play with that same energy and drive each day, proving that the new "Cardinal Way" beats their opponents before and after the games are played, and never lets off the gas during the nine innings they face opponents either.

These two goals will not be easy to see early on, but over time, the Cardinals' success on the field will be heavily influenced by whether or not these things become true. Bloom has proven to be a guy who can set that kind of culture before, and we'll see if he's successful in doing so with St. Louis, too.