By Rob Rains
The most significant part of the Cardinals’ announcement on Wednesday about changes in the team’s upper management structure was the promotion of Bill DeWitt III to chief executive officer, succeeding his father, Bill DeWitt Jr.
As the CEO, DeWitt III will be in charge of both baseball operations as well as the business operations, which he had been running for the last 18 years.
DeWitt III vowed to be a “patient listener for the time being” as he gets more familiar with baseball operations, which will still be run by Chaim Bloom.
“Right now the baseball organization is in good shape,” DeWitt III said. “I don’t come into this saying we have to change the following things on the baseball side. I come at it more as somebody who is ready and willing to go a little deeper into the organization on the baseball side than perhaps I have in the past.
“I haven’t collaborated in a significant way down through that organization … very much being a patient listener for the time being until I get a little more confident.”
DeWitt Jr. will remain the chairman of the board and principal owner and will continue to be involved in significant team business and decisions.
“When you think about it most big decisions are collaborative anyway,” DeWitt III said.
The Cardinals also announced the promotion of Anuk Karunaratne to president of business operations, assuming DeWitt III’s former position. He has worked for the team since 2024 as senior vice president of business operations after working for seven years for the Toronto Blue Jays.
The promotion of Karunaratne, in one sense, follows the path the Cardinals took with Bloom in his rise to succeeding John Mozeliak as the president of baseball operations.
“I think we liked the model that we sort of stumbled upon with Chaim,” DeWitt III said, noting that Bloom was hired first as a consultant, then announced that he would take over as the president of baseball operations a year before he actually assumed the position last October.
“He was sort of a free agent and we snapped him up,” DeWitt III said. “Last year he made a number of changes in the organizational structure during Mo’s last year and it seemed to work well.
“Anuk kind of similarly had a good runway here so it made sense given that he had shown the leadership capabilities during his previous two years plus.”
Karunaratne said while the titles might have changed, it really doesn’t represent a significant change in how that side of the Cardinals will be run.
“It’s not going to be the case that tomorrow is going to be a brand new operating model,” Karunaratne said. “This has very much been an evolution.”
It will remain to be seen if there will be changes in the team’s strategy, depending on the team is performing as the Aug. 3 trade deadline approaches.
“It’s been a really fun team to watch,” DeWitt III said. “We’ve got a lot of young players who are sort of coming into their own. Maybe we’re a little ahead of where we thought we were, but still a long way to go.”
Bloom also was at the press conference and he said nothing has changed with his view of the short-term and long-term decisions he believes are in the best interest of the team and its future success.
“I think the cool thing about what has happened to this point, in part because of what we did in the off-season and I think there might be lesson in this, we did it with a focus on a certain ambition and a certain goal and the success we’ve come by I think we’ve come by it honestly, not through taking shortcuts,” Bloom said.
“We want to have the success through building toward something … That really needs to be front and center for us.”
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To hear the press conference and also hear Rob Rains and Mike Rains discussing it, click the video player below.
Audio by David Solomon
