St. Louis Cardinals make another coaching change, club operations president confirms
After a summer in which the team’s offensive approach was frequently under fire and amid a fall which saw a surprise firing in the dugout, the St. Louis Cardinals coaching staff has undergone another change.
Assistant hitting coach Jobel Jiménez will not be returning to the club in 2022, President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak acknowledged to the News-Democrat Monday, confirming the report of a source.
That source said Jiménez was offered a role as a roving minor league instructor, but declined.
Jiménez, 46, was promoted to the Cardinals from Triple-A Memphis on Aug. 12, 2019, as a replacement for Mark Budaska. His two and a half years on the Major League staff were the capstone to his 15 years as part of the St. Louis organization, where he started in 2007 as a hitting coach in the Venezuelan Summer League.
The Cardinals have frequently described a desire to add a voice to the coaching staff with significant professional experience in an attempt to relate modern philosophies and the measurements of modern technology to players in an in-game setting. Jiménez, though implicitly trusted by many players and a frequent sounding board for hitting advice, had only two seasons of minor league experience as a player.
Former Cardinals outfielder Ryan Ludwick, whose advisory position was eliminated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, rejoined the organization this summer and spent several days in uniform in an undefined coaching role. He remains a candidate to take on a full time position.
Jiménez’s departure represents the first known change to the coaching staff since Oliver Marmol was hired as the 51st manager in franchise history one week ago. Both Marmol and Mozeliak expressed a desire to complete a coaching staff by the end of the World Series, which is set to conclude by Wednesday at the latest.
Marmol expressed a belief the staff would return in full during his introductory press conference, saying, “we’re excited about our staff, we’re excited about them coming back.”
The organization had previously advertised a desire to return all members of the 2021 Major League staff for the dugout for 2022, with an emphasis only on replacing Marmol as bench coach and perhaps adding a figure such as Ludwick in a support role, supplementing the existing coaches.
That desire, clearly, changed, and with Jiménez’s departure, the Cardinals continue to pursue a winter of turnover in the dugout even as they advertise organizational stability and continuity from one year to the next.
This story was originally published November 1, 2021 at 4:32 PM.
