And here’s your Friday news dump, courtesy of the Astros.
Randy Flores will be the new Astros’ general manager, the first former player to hold the job since Bob Watson. Ironically, Flores replaced Chris Correa in St. Louis, who was sentenced to 46 months in prison back in 2016 for illegally accessing Houston’s player personnel database when Jeff Luhnow was general manager.
Following a week with the Brewers’ assistant GM Matt Kleine as the presumptive favorite, a recent extension he signed with the 2026 World Series champion, as reported by Brian McTaggart of MLB.com, seemingly complicated matters. Evidently, it became too much of an obstacle, and the Astros pivoted to Flores, who had most recently served as the assistant general manager and director of scouting.
What a turn of events.
Bear with me as I start to speculate a bit now.
At face value, the decision to hire the 51-year-old Flores is perplexing. Jim Crane did make it a point after firing Dana Brown to emphasize how the Astros would look further into smaller payrolls teams and how they operated, namely the Brewers, Rays, and Guardians. Kleine felt like a natural conclusion to that search. If any potential buyout of Kleine’s new contract with Milwaukee proved too much for Crane, well, that’s an interesting decision. Of course, senior advisor Jeff Bagwell was also involved in the general manager search, so we can’t discount the fact that Flores is a former player with a scouting-first background in that pivot.
That said, I do want to give Flores a chance. Perhaps he’s a bit more forward-thinking than Dana Brown? If my quick reading of Twitter/X is any indication, Flores appears to have a good reputation around the game for identifying talent. While the Cardinals have struggled in recent years, there is some interesting talent in that organization. Ultimately, Flores deserves a fair shake. However, this general manager search has become increasingly bizarre, and the organization has given little reason to believe this dysfunction will resolve itself anytime soon.
Feature photo courtesy of Astros on X
Crane did nothing to improve the team. Same background as Dana Brown. Next move, hire a players’ manager and eat Walker’s contract to replace him with another Walker or Abreu. The way I see it, when a scout reaches the position of GM assistant, that’s the pinnacle of his career. A scout doesn’t have the necessities of a GM. A GM is an organization builder, not a real life “Fantasy Baseball” player. A GM looks at the whole organization and hire the right people to execute his vision. That’s not what a scout does. A scout fills a lineup. Three more years of mediocrity.