By Rob Rains
A day after the Cardinals’ season ended, Chaim Bloom said Monday that he believes the team accomplished its goal of keeping the focus on long-term success instead of short-term gratification.
Speaking to the media at Busch Stadium, the team’s president of baseball operations also emphasized how much work is still to be done to reach that goal.
The Cardinals finished their second consecutive losing season and a fourth consecutive year out of the playoffs on Sunday but Bloom said he thought the team made progress toward its goal this year.
“There’s a lot of good things happening now that I’m proud of,” Bloom said. “And we can still say out loud that we are not where we want to be yet.
“We need to challenge ourselves more. This is a dangerous time … in my view there is nothing that happened this year that should tempt us to lose focus on our goals. We need to keep building and to do it the right way without shortcuts.”
Bloom said that long-term focus might look different this winter than it did a year ago, when the team traded away many of its older, established players for prospects.
“We are not in the position we were last year,” he said. “Now we can more easily see a core that has a chance to be together for a while.”
That could allow the team to be more aggressive in adding to that core, Bloom said, especially through free agency, but only if those moves mesh with the long-term goals.
One area where that could come into play is in the bullpen, Bloom said.
“We had some ups and downs out there obviously this year,” he said. “There is no question there is opportunity for us to improve out there. It’s definitely an area where you could see us commit resources.
“I also think it’s nice in the bullpen to have a little bit of ‘been-there, done-that’ even in a young group; some guys to help some young players learn to navigate those ups and downs and learn from each other … It’s definitely something we’re going to look at.”
Bloom did acknowledge that whatever moves the team looks into making this winter will come against the backdrop of a potential work stoppage. The current labor agreement between the owners and the players union expires on Dec. 1.
“My own thought on this is every time the CBA is up there’s always the possibility of some (rules) changes,” Bloom said. “We don’t really know. With respect to anything around the expiration of the CBA, my thought is let’s not get too cute and get too far away from things that are fundamentally in line with building an organization.”
Bloom also knows that at some point, there will be an agreement and the Cardinals will be back on the field again.
He is confident that when that happens, the strides the team made this season, even if they weren’t always reflected in wins and losses, are paying dividends that will be seen in the years to come.
“It’s really all about keeping that goal in mind; what’s going to put us in the best position to win and be able to keep winning, and just try to hold every possible opportunity against that yardstick,” Bloom said.
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