Bloom on Cardinals: 'We’re Not Anywhere Close to Where We Need to Be'

With St. Louis forced to be without October baseball for a fourth straight fall – something that hasn’t happened in 31 years – St. Louis Cardinals president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom discussed the gap the club must close with the National League-champion Milwaukee Brewers and his dislike for firm timetables as it relates to the organization’s rebuild.

While appearing as an in-studio guest on The Morning After STL radio show on 101 ESPN in St. Louis, Bloom discussed his happiness with the Cardinals’ young and feisty roster remaining in contention for a Wild Card spot most of the season and the many breakout performances the club got throughout the season. However, Bloom spoke of his wariness about the club relaxing even though there is still plenty of work left to do on a ball club that finished 77-85 and 26 games back of the NL Central Division champion Brewers.

“The biggest thing we wanted to have come front and center this year was that core coming into focus – the center of a group you could see standing on a podium someday,” Bloom told TMA STL. “We wanted to feel like that (identification of a core) was something that was closer, and I do think that happened. We can look at it today and say you can see this group coming together.

“But, at the same time, when you zoom out, we won 77 games and it was abundantly clear that while we were exciting and fun to watch, we’re still not anywhere close to where we need to be,” Bloom continued. “From my end – inside the building and outside the building – that this is not something where we say, ‘We’re back on track; let’s sit back and let this happen.’ This game is harder than that and the competition is better than that, and we can’t lose our focus or our edge even though there were some positives this year.”

First baseman Alec Burleson led MLB in RBI with 116, while Jordan Walker hit 29 homers, drove in 102 runs, won MLB’s Home Run Derby and became a first-time All-Star. Rookies Joshua Baez (three homers in his MLB debut) and Leo Bernal (21 RBI in 24 games) showed off their immense promise with stellar starts.

Defensively, second baseman JJ Wetherholt, shortstop Masyn Winn and right-handed pitcher Michael McGreevy were named Gold Glove finalists, and all are favorites to take home awards when the winners are announced on Nov. 1. On the pitching side, 12-game winner Andre Pallante authored a nice bounce-back season, 10-game winner Kyle Leahy handled the transition from the bullpen to starting staff and Riley O’Brien tied for the NL lead in saves despite some second-half struggles.

The Cardinals were nine games over .500 at three different points early in the season and hit the MLB All-Star break at 50-45. However, they lost their first six series after the break, traded veteran pitchers Dustin May and JoJo Romero to the Brewers on Aug. 3 and looked like a shell of themselves in an ugly September. Also, the Cards were a franchise-record-worst 2-11 against the Brewers and went 0-for-Milwaukee in six tries this past season.

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If the Cardinals can fill holes at third base, center field and in the bullpen they could potentially battle for a Wild Card next season. However, Bloom reiterated that he will not let short-term success sway him away from the ultimate goal of building a sustainable winner capable of grasping the club’s 12th World Series crown. That ultimately went into his thinking when he traded away Romero and May – free-agents-to-be this winter – for highly coveted prospects Alexander Frias and Josiah Ragsdale.

While refusing to put a timeline on how long the club will continue to rebuild, Bloom said the Cardinals will know when they have turned the corner on building and are poised to aggressively add to their roster.

“I actually think (manager) Oli (Marmol) said it well when he was like, ‘You’ll know it when you are there,’” he said. “But when you start trying to yolk yourself to some timeline, a., you might hold yourself back from getting ahead of (the timeline) and, b., you might do silly things to trying to catch up to something arbitrary, as opposed to keeping your head down and doing the right thing again, again and again and getting there.”

Bloom noted that because of the age of the roster – the Cardinals and Nats took turns possessing MLB’s youngest roster throughout the 2026 season following various roster moves – St. Louis is likely to still be in building mode when MLB returns after negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. Baseball America ranked the Cardinals’ Minor League system – led by standout catcher Rainiel Rodriguez and hard-throwing left-handed starter Liam Doyle – as No. 2 in baseball, and Bloom wants to give those prospects time and space to prove themselves once they reach the big-league level.   

“The first day I was in this job, I sat there (at a news conference) and I was clear that this is a multi-year project,” he recalled. “Certainly, we need to keep that focus now. A lot of good things happened this year, but we have 77 wins and we’re not where we need to be yet and we’re going to keep our head down.

“If you had tried to pin me down then (on a firm timetable), I’d probably have said, ‘Look, we’re probably talking two to three years until we can really make some noise.’ But I don’t like to say those things because I don’t want to have people think we’re giving up on (seasons) until then, which is not the case because there’s not a moment where we’re going to concede a thing. We’re going to try to win every single day that we walk in that building.”