Flores getting ready for first Draft with Cards

ST. LOUIS — With the days dwindling until the MLB Draft on June 9-11, the Cardinals’ new scouting director, Randy Flores, will spend one more week on the road before returning to St. Louis to meet with his staff and make final preparations for the three-day, 40-round event.

Flores, who pitched five of his eight seasons for the Cardinals before taking over the scouting department, was headed to Hoover, Ala., on Monday for the start of the Southeastern Conference baseball tournament. He cleared time in his schedule for a final week of scouting by eliminating the pre-Draft workouts that the Cardinals had hosted in recent years.

These workouts, which typically took place in multiple regions across the country, would give members of the scouting department an opportunity to get a first-hand look at a couple dozen Draft prospects. But they also meant that those scouts were bound by those schedules, with no flexibility to move around based on need or opportunity.

“It was simply a decision of where to allocate a finite product of time, focus and energy,” said Flores, hired in late August 2015 to replace Chris Correa, who had been dismissed for …

continue reading in source mlb.mlb.com