Chaim Bloom is used to fielding questions about Major League Baseball. The Cardinals president of baseball operations did just that at the Jewish Community Center on Friday, Jan. 16, when he was the featured speaker for year’s first edition of the Staenberg Network, a quarterly series that connects the community with Jewish business leaders.
More than 400 people listened as Bloom discussed the state of the Cardinals with Benjamin Hochman, sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. During a Q&A that followed, Bloom addressed the audience’s concerns about escalating player salaries and the Cards’ rebuilding process.
The last question came from Dan Vianello.
“I’m not the baseball expert in my family,” said Vianello, a member of Bais Abraham Congregation. “That would be my 11-year-old son, Joey.”
Vianello produced a list of questions and comments from his son, a sixth-grader at Saul Mirowitz Jewish Community School. They included Joey’s assessment of newly signed outfielder Emanuel Luna (favorable) and a request that top rookie prospect JJ Wetherholt not make his first game appearance on Shabbat.
Joey, a shortstop, is an avid student of baseball, his father said.
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“He read Nolan Ryan’s biography,” Vianello said. “He read Tony LaRussa’s book about the 2006 World Series win. He’ll spend an hour reading baseball news every day. His option for screen time is not ‘Can I watch a TV show?’ It’s ‘Can I watch the highlights of the baseball game?’ ”
Bloom, impressed by Joey’s baseball knowledge, said that St. Louis fans’ avid support of the Cardinals was a positive factor in his decision to take a highly visible and pressure-filled job. After a run with the Boston Red Sox as chief baseball officer from 2020 to 2023, Bloom came to St. Louis in January 2024. He said he was eager to help deliver a winning team.
“The excitement in this comes not just from doing great things, but from doing them together with people who are invested in it, and this organization has been that type of place,” he said, adding that the strength of the local Jewish community was important for his family. “It is a really strong Jewish community here. It’s a place that is culturally very strong. It’s academically very strong, which is important to me, and important to my wife and her career. It has all those things. So, it just seemed like a really good fit.”
