Randy Flores, Drafting Dreams & The 20-Year Cardinal Reunion

Twenty years after helping the St. Louis Cardinals win the 2006 World Series, Randy Flores is back with The Rizzuto Show — except now he's sitting on the other side of baseball, helping find the players who could become the Cardinals' next generation of stars.

The Cardinals assistant GM of scouting and acquisition joins this comedy podcast to talk about Draft365: Scouting MLB's Future Stars, a behind-the-scenes look at a side of professional baseball fans almost never get to see.

And when we say behind the scenes, we mean it.

Flores explains how roughly 23 Cardinals scouts spread across the country evaluate elite high school and college talent, how players make their way onto the organization's radar, and what happens when scouts, analysts, data engineers, performance specialists and actual human eyeballs all have to agree on which teenager might someday be standing at Busch Stadium.

Turns out it's slightly more complicated than your uncle saying, “Kid's got a good swing.”

Randy also explains just how absurdly difficult it is to reach Major League Baseball. The crew immediately starts Googling percentages, Rafe consults what basically becomes “Gronk AI,” and everyone arrives at the same scientific conclusion:

Your odds aren't great.

Even the players who get drafted were usually THE player where they came from — the best kid in their town, school or region — only to arrive in professional baseball and discover they're now surrounded by hundreds of other guys who were also the best kid everywhere they came from.

Welcome to the world's most emotionally devastating All-Star team.

Flores talks about seeing that firsthand after being drafted himself and walking into the Yankees system, where he realized his team was only one of several groups making cuts — inside just one organization. Multiply that by the rest of Major League Baseball and suddenly “making the show” sounds less like a career plan and more like surviving a very athletic Hunger Games.

The conversation also dives into Cardinals prospects like Jordan Walker and Joshua Baez, including how the unusual COVID-era draft helped St. Louis feel confident about Walker and how adversity in the minor leagues helped prepare Baez for his eventual opportunity.

And despite baseball becoming more obsessed with analytics, Randy explains why scouting still can't be reduced to numbers on a screen. Players leave home. They struggle. They get hurt. They fail for possibly the first time in their lives. Scouts aren't only evaluating what someone can do when everything is going right — they're trying to figure out what happens when baseball punches them directly in the mouth.

That's where the human side still matters.

For parents convinced they're currently raising the next MLB superstar, Flores also delivers some advice that may save everybody several thousand dollars and one deeply uncomfortable car ride home: if the kid is truly good enough, scouts will find them. Parents can help most by supporting the kid instead of turning every Little League game into Game 7 of the World Series.

The pressure is already enormous. Kids now have rankings, social media clips and embarrassing moments that can follow them indefinitely. Randy's advice is refreshingly simple: home should still be the safe place.

We also get into Randy's unusual road from an eight-year MLB career to graduate school, broadcasting, coaching, entrepreneurship and eventually a phone call from John Mozeliak asking whether he'd consider becoming a scouting director — to which Randy essentially responded, “Cool. What's a scouting director?”

Career planning!

Plus, Randy previews the 20-year reunion of the 2006 World Series champion Cardinals and explains what he hopes fans take away from Draft365: behind every prospect is an enormous group of people obsessively trying to keep the Cardinals' pipeline loaded with talent.

By the end, Rafe wants to be scouted, Moon wants a job, Jon Lovitz's performance as a scout in A League of Their Own is finally evaluated by an actual professional, and somehow Marla Hooch helps bring the interview home.

It's baseball insight, St. Louis Cardinals history and just enough nonsense to remind Randy he willingly walked into a comedy podcast.

Twenty-five minutes later, we're all convinced we're getting drafted.

We're not.

But that's never stopped this comedy podcast before.

Follow The Rizzuto Show → linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.

Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → 1057thepoint.com/RizzShow.

Hear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Rad