Astros Hire Randy Flores As General Manager

The Astros have hired former Cardinals assistant GM Randy Flores as their new general manager. The team announced the move on Friday evening. Chandler Rome, Katie Woo and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported just before the announcement that Flores was a serious candidate for the position. “Randy has had a huge impact on the Cardinals over the last 10 seasons,” Houston owner Jim Crane said in the release. “Throughout the entire interview process, we’ve been thoroughly impressed with Randy and with his background in scouting and player acquisition. We’re happy to welcome Randy and his family to the Astros and we can’t wait to get to work on bringing another championship to Houston.” Flores and Crane will meet with the media during an introductory press conference on Monday morning. It’s a surprise turn of events. The Athletic reported on Thursday morning that Brewers assistant GM Matt Kleine had emerged as the frontrunner for the position. Although it’s unclear precisely what changed, The Athletic suggests that Kleine had been seeking the title ‘president of baseball operations’ earlier in the week. They write that the Milwaukee AGM never pulled his name out of the running, though it’s possible there was some kind of hangup in negotiations on title and/or salary even if Kleine had initially been Crane’s top target. In any case, it’s a momentous step in Flores’ career. The 51-year-old takes over a baseball operations department for the first time. Flores had spent more than a decade in the St. Louis front office, climbing the ranks from scouting director to assistant GM over the 2018-19 offseason. He’d coincidentally been hired as scouting director in 2015 to replace Chris Correa, who’d been fired and ultimately imprisoned for illegally accessing the Astros’ internal databases early in Jeff Lunhow’s GM tenure. Flores is a former big league player, a lefty reliever who appeared in 350 games with four teams between 2002-10. He won a World Series ring in ’06 with St. Louis. After retiring as a player, Flores completed a Master’s degree in education while working as an assistant coach with the USC baseball team. He also run a company that provided video scouting reports on amateur players. Flores’ background in amateur scouting has carried into his role with the Cardinals, whose drafts he’s run for the last 11 years. St. Louis has had a lot of success as a draft and develop organization over the years, especially in the middle rounds. They’d begun to fall behind on pitching development in the early 2020s, which led to a few middling seasons and their ongoing retool. The Cardinals appear to be back on the upswing thanks in part to a core of position player draftees like JJ Wetherholt, Masyn Winn, Jordan Walker and Alec Burleson. The Cardinals have had their share of misses as well. They used first-round selections on Delvin Perez, Nolan Gorman, Zack Thompson, Cooper Hjerpe, and Chase Davis during Flores’ tenure. No club is going to have a spotless draft record, though, and they’ve found potential building blocks in Wetherholt and Walker. Winn, Burleson and current top prospect Joshua Báez were second-round or competitive balance round picks. They nabbed a couple serviceable starters in Andre Pallante and Kyle Leahy deeper in the draft. More to come. View Comments (10)