Chaim Bloom has been working for the Cardinals for more than two years now, first in an advisory capacity and then as the baseball-operations-leader-in-waiting, but he has been the man officially in charge of the organization for only a few months now. It is fair to say that he has put his stamp on the organization -- in every possible way -- during that time in charge.
With the trade of All-Star Brendan Donovan to the Mariners on Monday night, Bloom made the biggest deal of his tenure so far -- certainly the one that brought back the biggest return -- but it’s one that’s very much of a piece of his entire Cardinals project. After 30 years of successful baseball in St. Louis, Cardinals fans certainly aren’t used to trading away players of Donovan’s caliber, not to mention Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras and Nolan Arenado.
But unlike the last time Bloom was in charge of an organization -- when he had the unenviable task of trading Mookie Betts away from the Red Sox -- these moves are all logical and part of the larger plan. This is Bloom’s chance to get it right this time, and to do it his way.
There may be another smaller trade or two coming -- JoJo Romero is a bullpen arm that many teams would love -- but the heavy lifting of the deconstruction process is now complete. The Cardinals have only two players (Romero and Lars Nootbaar) left over from last year’s team who aren’t under team control through the 2028 season. Everyone else is now part of the plan moving forward, or at least will have a chance to play their way into those plans.
What does that plan look like? When is it reasonable to expect the Cardinals to contend again? What do they already have in the coffers, and what do they have coming? Here are four reasons to think the Cardinals, even after trading four key players off their big league roster, are extremely well-positioned moving forward … entirely because of what Bloom has already done.
1. The current roster is young -- and makes much more sense
Donovan has two more years of team control left and was maybe the most popular Cardinal on the roster, so nobody would have been upset if he had stuck around and been the team’s leader and, possibly, best player. But trading him, in addition to bringing more young players into the system, definitely clears up some lineup logjams.
Donovan likely would have played second base, third base and left field, but trading him to Seattle opens up all sorts of space. Nolan Gorman and Thomas Saggese may form a platoon at third base, and Nootbaar has a golden opportunity to rebuild his value in left field when he returns from offseason surgery on his heel. Perhaps most exciting, JJ Wetherholt, the current No. 5 prospect on the MLB Pipeline Top 100, is almost certainly going to be the Opening Day second baseman.
Clearing out Donovan’s spot also gives the Cardinals flexibility at first base and designated hitter. Iván Herrera, who is probably the Cardinals’ best hitter, is going to try to stick at catcher, but now the Cardinals can more easily keep his bat in the lineup by putting him at DH (or even first base) and they can also have space for Gorman or Alec Burleson in that DH spot as well.
This is particularly important because all those players are in their 20s (only Burleson, at 27, is older than 25), and the Cardinals need to give them all the playing time they can handle in order to find out whether they’re part of the next great Cardinals team. (This is true, especially so, for right fielder Jordan Walker, for whom 2026 may be a last chance to establish himself in St. Louis.) The Cardinals' 2026 lineup likely looks something like this:
2B JJ Wetherholt
DH Iván Herrera
LF Lars Nootbaar
1B Alec Burleson
3B Nolan Gorman/Thomas Saggese
SS Masyn Winn
RF Jordan Walker
C Pedro Pages/Jimmy Crooks
CF Victor Scott II
The Cardinals don’t have a single position player over age 28, and other than Nootbaar, they’re all under team control through at least the 2028 season. The Cardinals will find out what they have for the back half of the decade, right now. And who knows? They might be a little better in 2026 than you might think: Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections at FanGraphs had them as “roughly a .500-looking team with some Wild Card upside,” albeit before the Donovan trade. Even after that, this isn’t likely to be a 100-loss bottoming out. Which, considering how young this team is, isn’t too shabby.
2. The farm system is suddenly loaded
Bloom, before taking over as president of baseball operations, was in charge of revamping the farm system, and he has been on a hiring frenzy over the last two years, particularly when it comes to Minor League development personnel, something that had, by all accounts, eroded over the last half-decade in St. Louis. That’s still an ongoing process, but one thing is undeniably true: The Cardinals have a ton of young talent, right now, already. With the addition of pitcher Jurrangelo Cijntje from the Mariners in the Donovan trade, the Cardinals now have six players in the MLB Pipeline Top 100.
And that’s with Bloom only in charge a few months. Wetherholt should be on the Opening Day roster, and Baez is expect to be at Busch Stadium sometime this summer, with Bernal and maybe even Doyle not far behind him. (And Rodriguez’s raw power sent him rocketing up prospect charts last year.)
COMPLETE CARDINALS PROSPECT COVERAGE
But the real impressive thing is how much pitching there is in the system that wasn’t here just a year ago: Bloom has added Blake Aita, Brandon Clarke, Hunter Dobbins, Yhoiker Fajardo, Richard Fitts and Jack Martinez to a cadre of arms that already included Cade Crossland, Tanner Franklin, Tink Hence, Cooper Hjerpe, Quinn Mathews, Brycen Mautz and Tekoah Roby. Pitching depth has been a primary source of the Cardinals’ problems over the last half-decade. The Cardinals now have more pitching stashed than they’ve had in a long, long time.
3. They’ve gotten themselves more Draft ammunition
The Cardinals got some bad lottery luck when they fell all the way to No. 13 in the first round of the 2026 Draft. But Bloom has a plan for that, too. This trade brought in not just the Mariners’ Competitive Balance pick next year but also the Rays’, which means the Cardinals are currently slated to pick 13th, 32nd, 50th, 68th, 72nd and 86th when the Draft rolls around, July 11-12 in Philadelphia. That not only gives Bloom’s front office more picks but also a larger bonus pool that they can deploy.
Again, the whole strategy here has been to bring in as much talent as possible. This definitely does that. And remember: This is just year one. Which brings us to …
4. They have the flexibility to go big in the future
The Cardinals included a lot of money in the Arenado, Gray and Contreras trades, paying down those players’ future salaries to maximize their returns. Even with that, St. Louis’ 2026 payroll is still expected to be lower, comparatively speaking, than it has been in decades. And remember: They have no player under a guaranteed contract after this season. Free-agent acquisitions Dustin May and Ryne Stanek signed one-year deals (with options), while the rest of the roster consists of players who are either arbitration eligible or still pre-arbitration.
Now, obviously, there will be arbitration raises, and new players who come in, and even some extensions (Winn sure looks like a possible candidate, as does Wetherholt), but the Cardinals, with all these trades, have no lingering contracts that they’ll have to get out from under. Which means the decks are cleared. Maybe they can extend some young stars. Maybe they can bring in free agents. Maybe they can trade from that pitching surplus to fill holes. There is nothing holding them back from any of it.
A vast and rabid Cardinals fanbase has become somewhat disenchanted by the mediocrity and struggles of the last few years, not to mention a certain sameness and inertia in the organization. But the fresh air that Bloom and company have breathed into the franchise may be just the thing to reactivate that fanbase, which could help the Cardinals get back to spending at traditional levels. The Cardinals have paid for talent before. There is no reason to think they will not do so again, particularly if the team can be flush with even more talent from this reconstruction.
No matter what, it’s clear that Bloom has remade the Cardinals in a way he was never able to remake the Red Sox when he was leading the front office in Boston. This is his team, though, made the way he wanted. You can already see early seeds sprouting. There are more to come.