No more standing pat: Bloom turns Cardinals 40-man into a moving target
Over the 2025 season, the St. Louis Cardinals made exactly one transaction involving the waiver wire that was not strictly necessary to open a spot on the active or 40-man rosters, losing outfielder Michael Helman to the Texas Rangers on May 14.
Their group of big league players remained remarkably static as the year wore on, reflecting an inherent conservatism in asset management that came to define the end of John Mozeliak’s tenure in the front office.
If there is one marked change in management tactics that’s easily perceptible in the transition from Mozeliak to Chaim Bloom, it is aggression in churning the last few spots on the roster. Monday’s move to claim reliever Zak Kent on waivers from the Rangers was the second time the Cardinals claimed him since the end of last season; the first, in December, saw him snatched up from Cleveland and then lost in January in yet another shuffle.
There is an industry-wide trend of embracing volatility in those last few spots, and that volatility creeps into in-game decision-making in undeniable ways.
“You’re constantly managing what are your optionable pieces,” manager Oli Marmol said. “If you don’t have many or you’re locked up, how do you use what you have in order to still be available for the next day? There’s a constant [of] making sure you take care of the game and what’s in front of you because you don’t know what tomorrow’s going to look like, but one of the filters is, if we make this move, what does that leave us for tomorrow?”
MLB’s byzantine roster rules seem complicated, but in the simplest version, a player must be added to the 40-man roster to be on the active roster for a game. Once added to that group, they can be sent freely up and down to the minors for three seasons (with some rare exceptions). If removed from the 40-man roster, they’re passed through waivers and can be claimed by any other team.
Reliever George Soriano, whom the Cardinals added in a trade with the Washington Nationals last week, has only pitched in the big leagues for the Miami Marlins. With all three of his option years used, the Marlins attempted to pass him through waivers early in the winter. He was claimed by the Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore cut him loose, and he was claimed by Atlanta. Atlanta put him back through the wire, and he was claimed by Washington.
The Cardinals, with a better record in 2025 than all of those teams, put multiple claims in for Soriano that were not executed because a team ahead of them in the priority list had a superseding claim. When Washington moved him off its roster, the Cardinals got aggressive, flipping Andre Granillo in a trade to secure Soriano, who they believe has potential they can unlock that exceeds what they would get from Granillo.
By claiming Kent, who has two options, the Cardinals find themselves with two pitchers rather than one, and Kent becomes that optionable piece that allows for more roster flexibility. The particular minutiae of the management boil down to a belief that they could squeeze just a little more performance out of a spot and were willing to trade some flexibility to get it.
The machinations somehow cut deeper.
Players on the 60-day injured list don’t count against the 40-man roster limit, and minor league pitchers Cooper Hjerpe and Tekoah Roby are both recovering from Tommy John surgery, guaranteed to miss more than two months at the start of the season. To claim Kent, the Cardinals needed only to move one of them to the 60-day IL; instead, they designated infielder Bryan Ramos for assignment to free up a spot for the waiver claim.
Why? Economics and control.
Because both Hjerpe and Roby were injured while pitching in the minors last season and neither appeared at all in the majors, they can be optioned, which is typically not allowed for injured players. If either was on the 60-day major league IL, he would earn service time and a big league salary — just as Zack Thompson did in 2025 as he missed the whole season with a shoulder ailment.
Understanding the MLB roster process is complex enough that it is the purview of multiple employees in any front office at a given time. There is also an ever-present sensitivity around labor issues that makes it difficult to comfortably boil players down to movable pieces without acknowledging the human toll of bouncing from organization to organization. Some teams, though — Baltimore and the Los Angeles Dodgers perhaps chief among them — have taken to using baseball’s waiver wire as an extension of their own roster.
The decision-making, then, becomes less about individual players and more about skill sets. Pitcher X who throws with a certain velocity could be any one of a large set of players at any given time, and the decision to not be particular about identities makes it easier to turn human beings into movable parts.
It’s not a glamorous side of the game, but it’s one the Cardinals could stand to optimize. For a team seeking to squeeze every drop of potential talent out of the players it has in house, there’s not much sense beyond sentiment in holding to high standards of loyalty for its own sake.
That means an active waiver wire, a lot of churn and many name tags moving in and out of their placeholders above locker stalls. The Cardinals are almost certain not to go another entire season with only one unforced change. They may not get to the end of the month without another handful.
