Bernie’s Redbird Review: The Cardinals Are Already Getting Smarter Under Chaim Bloom, Who Just Made A Great Hire.

As the executive who has been hired to guide the Cardinals out of their lapsed, retrograde state and into a smarter and more forward-thinking future, Chaim Bloom is off to a magnificent start.

With his first official move, Bloom put his insignia on the St. Louis baseball operation with the hiring of a young dynamo who comes here from the advanced baseball think tank run by the shrewd and resourceful Cleveland Guardians.

Rob Cerfolio, age 32, has the fancy title that fits his new role. He’s the assistant general manager who will oversee the player development and performance departments. Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. put Bloom in charge of a crucially important assignment: to modernize and reconstruct a broken minor-league and player development system.

The Cards have drafted plenty of good players in recent years but haven’t done a good enough job of preparing them for the majors. These young and future Cardinals have lacked effective instruction, coaching expertise and technologically-advanced tools. All of that will change under Bloom. And in recruiting Cerfolio, Bloom has found the ideal fit for the mission that is now underway.

Cerfolio joined the Guardians as an intern in 2015. He’s worked his way up through the organizational hierarchy. This industry up-and-comer spent the last three years as Cleveland’s director of player development. Cerfolio has had 10 years to absorb the immense knowledge that flows through the Guardians’ baseball structure. He has learned all of the intricate details about creating a model player-development system, finding great people to run it, and then drafting or signing the young talent to stock it.

When viewed as a tandem, Bloom and Cerfolio not only specialize in creating a start-of-the-art talent pipeline overall, but their backgrounds have displayed a special knack for identifying and cultivating young pitching.

Bloom in Tampa Bay.

Cerfolio in Cleveland.

And now they’re in St. Louis to lead a revival.

Think of elite baseball education that Cerfolio will bring to his new challenge. And I’m not referring to Yale; Bloom and Cerfolio are both Yalies. Oh my goodness. What is this world coming to?

Consider this about Cerfolio’s 10 seasons inside the Guardians’ baseball department:

1. From 2015 through 2024, Cleveland had the fourth-best regular-season winning percentage (.552) among the 30 MLB teams. Only the Dodgers, Astros and Yankees won more games over that time. Across the 10 seasons, the Guards won more games than the Cardinals, Cubs, Red Sox, Mets, Giants, Brewers, Phillies, Blue Jays, Twins and Rangers … among others.

2. From 2015 through 2024, Cleveland ranked sixth in the majors with 20 postseason victories. What’s so great about 20 postseason wins in 10 seasons? Perspective, my friends. In those same 10 seasons the Cardinals won five postseason games despite spending a helluva lot more money than the Guardians. Through the 10 seasons Cleveland also won more postseason games than a list of big spenders including the Red Sox, Mets, Padres, Blue Jays, Giants and Rangers.

3. Here’s what makes the regular-season and postseason success so impressive: over the 10 seasons Cleveland had an average annual payroll ranking of 23rd, and had a bottom-six payroll in four of those years. The Guardians never ranked higher than 15th in the annual payroll standings. Their 2016 American League championship team ranked 23rd in payroll. Two other of Cleveland’s postseason teams ranked 24th and 27th.

4. Under the new leadership, homegrown talent will become even a larger priority. And the Cards will likely be more active in the international markets. This season Cleveland’s 40-man roster had 24 players drafted and developed within the system. There was only one player who initially came to Cleveland as a free-agent signing. Twelve players were acquired via trade. And three were Rule 5 draft picks. The 2024 Guardians also had 13 international players in their 40-man talent pool including Jose Ramirez, Steven Kwan, Brayan Rocchio and Jhonkensy Noel.

As my friend Josh Jacobs noted in a piece written Tuesday morning:

“The Guardians roster is littered with homegrown talent or under-the-radar names they were able to acquire in trades or free agency before maximizing their talent in Cleveland. Steven Kwan, Will Brennan, Bo Naylor, Brayan Rocchio, Jhonkensy Noel, Tanner Bibee, Gavin Williams, Cade Smith, Hunter Gaddis, Tim Herrin, Eli Morgan, Andrew Walters, and Daniel Schneemann were all drafted or signed via international amateur free agency since Cerfolio joined their front office — while names like David Fry, Kyle Manzardo, Emmanuel Clase, and Andres Gimenez were all acquired by the club before truly breaking out at the MLB-level.”

5. Think about what this means for St. Louis pitching in the coming seasons. The Cardinals must restore their lost strength. I’m talking about the way this organization used to draft and develop good pitching for an internal conveyor that gave them an edge over many competitors. But that area lapsed, and the Cardinals lost ground. The ballclub is trying to get the pitching factory back on line. And with Bloom and Cerfolio in place I have to like STL’s chances.

Bloom was a big part of the process that kept low-budget Tampa Bay rich in pitching talent. From 2007 through 2018, only four teams allowed fewer runs than the Rays. And only two teams gave up fewer runs than Tampa Bay’s starting pitchers.

And quality pitching is a distinguished hallmark of Cleveland’s baseball identity. During Cerfolio’s 10 years in “The Land,” the Guardians ranked No. 3 in the majors in team ERA, were tied for third in starting-pitching ERA, and had MLB’s best bullpen ERA.

There’s already some whining (as always) about DeWitt being “cheap” by restructuring the baseball ops to get the franchise back to a more economical and sensible way of building a baseball team.

I realize these folks have all the answers, but evidently they’ve never heard of Jeff Luhnow.

It’s called “payroll efficiency.”

And it has nothing to do with being cheap.

It has everything to do with being smart.

I vote for intelligence. I don’t need DeWitt to start a bonfire with all of the bad money spent on payroll. That payroll waste is a prominent reason why the Cardinals have missed the playoffs five times in the last eight full seasons.

Bloom, Cerfolio (and others to come) will give the Cardinals their best payroll efficiency since DeWitt hired Luhnow from the outside in the early aughts.

Luhnow wasn’t a “baseball guy.” Bloom isn’t a “baseball guy.” Even though he pitched for Yale, Cerfolio isn’t a “baseball guy” either.

Some Cardinals fans are bizarrely obsessed with this. They expect Branch Rickey to return from the grave, or something. They want a codger to take control of this baseball team. Give me a REAL baseball guy, dammit!

My gosh, people. Please stop. I say this as a 65-year old man who loves nostalgia. I have a heart filled with warm sentiment in fond remembrances of years gone by. Sure, I would like to return to, say, 1966. But it’s 2024. It won’t be long before 2025 is here. Evolve and adapt. Evolve and adapt. Evolve and adapt. It ain’t that hard. If I can do it, you can do it. Analytics and metrics won’t kill you or cause hair loss.

Theo Epstein, another Yale man, wasn’t a “baseball guy,” either. But it’s funny how all of those beloved, old-school baseball guys failed to build a World Series winner for the Cubs and the Red Sox. Before Epstein was put in charge of the baseball ops in Boston, the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1918. Epstein built Boston teams that won two during his time there, in 2004 and ‘2007. The Cubs had famously failed to win a World Series since 1908, but Epstein raised that Titanic as well in 2016.

It’s important for the Cardinals to hire as many smart people as possible for the project at hand as the Cardinals scramble to catch up with the industry trends in baseball’s information age.

Bloom has a sharp mind. The hiring of Cerfolio adds another sharp mind. And they will both bring in other smart minds. That’s how you turn things around. In my experience as a pro-sports observer – writing and broadcasting and all of that – I’ve come to believe that the best teams are led by smart people who want to hire other smart people, and surround themselves with smart people.

DeWitt took too long to adjust; he let the baseball department – and by extension the farm-development system – get musty and moldy. Which obviously is his fault. But as I’ve been saying for a while now, DeWitt’s commitment to Bloom was the start of a new beginning. And that’s a positive shift by ownership.

By going back to the Luhnow way, DeWitt is moving forward. And I like it. I’ll find other stuff to raise hell about, but this ain’t one of them.

Thanks for reading …

–Bernie

A 2023 inductee into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, Bernie has provided informed opinions and perspective on St. Louis sports through his columns, radio shows and podcasts since 1985.

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Stats used in my baseball columns are sourced from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, Statcast, StatHead, Baseball Savant, Baseball Prospectus, Brooks Baseball Net, and Sports Info Solutions unless otherwise noted.