St. Louis Cardinals to promote John Mozeliak, name Mike Girsch GM

John Mozeliak is moving into a new role with Mike Girsch becoming the Cardinals’ new GM.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Derrick Goold first reported on Friday, the St. Louis Cardinals announced the promotion of John Mozeliak to a new role as President of Baseball Operations. As Goold writes, Mozeliak will “still remain heavily involved” in day-to-day baseball operations. With Mozeliak, who has been the Cardinals’ GM since the 2007 offseason, being promoted, the Cardinals will appoint assistant GM Mike Girsch as the new general manager.

With Mozeliak moving into a new role, assistant general manager will become the 14th GM in club history. Girsch, who graduated with a math degree from Notre Dame and an MBA from the University of Chicago, has been in the Cardinals’ front office since 2006, serving in his current role since January 2011. Girsch was responsible for helping to bring an analytical approach to the Cardinals’ front office, playing a crucial role in developing RedBirdDog, the team’s report-writing system, and The Dashboard, the team’s primary scouting database.

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Mozeliak, a graduate of the University of Colorado, was the last active MLB GM who had completed his undergraduate education at a university west of the Mississippi River. With Girsch taking over, every general manager has now graduated from an institution on the eastern side of the country, though Dodgers GM Farhan Zaidi did complete his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.