Cardinals own No. 7 pick in MLB Draft: Here’s how they’ll navigate the process

For the first time in 26 years, the St. Louis Cardinals will have a top-10 pick in the MLB Draft. The draft lottery slotted the Cardinals with the No. 7 selection, their highest pick since selecting J.D. Drew with the fifth pick in 1998. It will be just the Cardinals’ 10th top-10 pick since the draft was established in 1965.

This year’s draft, which runs from July 14-16 in Arlington, Texas, represents uncharted territory for assistant general manager and director of scouting Randy Flores and his team. Flores, who overtook the scouting department in August 2015, has never drafted higher than 18th. The significance of his first top-10 pick will be emphasized even more given that the Cardinals will not have another selection until the third round (No. 80), as they forfeited their second-round slot when signing Sonny Gray over the offseason.

Flores has been lauded for his work in prior seasons, specifically his 2020 draft class — which landed Jordan Walker, Masyn Winn, Tink Hence and Alec Burleson — and his work in 2018 (Nolan Gorman, Brendan Donovan and Lars Nootbaar were all drafted within the first 10 rounds). But a top-10 pick, given the rarity of it in St. Louis, hits differently.

The latest mock draft from The Athletic’s Keith Law has the Cardinals taking Bryce Rainer, a shortstop out of Harvard-Westlake High School — the same California high school of former Cardinal Jack Flaherty.

The initial challenge in preparation, Flores explained, is navigating the best processes when virtually no one in the organization had a recent experience with a pick this high on the draft board.

“I can only go from personal experience, and we’ve never done that,” Flores said. “Then when you try to lean on people in the organization, they’re like, ‘Well we haven’t done this in a couple of decades.’”

“It’s new for all of us,” he added. “You have a certain rhythm to the scouting schedule that you get to your final board in a way that’s different when you’re picking in the back third relative to the first third.”

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With little organizational experience to base this year’s draft plan on, Flores honed in on establishing a “deliberate” process, similar to years prior in terms of not focusing on which players could be in contention too early. “We don’t race to the answer ahead of taking the test,” he quipped. 

The combination of a top-10 pick and no second-round pick means the Cardinals will go 73 players between selections. That substantial gap meant Flores’ team needed to be especially thorough, ensuring they weren’t hyper-fixating on their top pick.

“We wanted to be really intentional to not have our scouts — because we don’t have a second-round pick — only write up and lock in on players who are in contention at pick seven,” Flores said. “Especially because early in the process, you can anchor to names that you have rather than casting a wider net and letting the names rise on their own organically.

“We only pick seven and then a gap until 80 at the third round. Our meetings will have to focus on both because of a new draft position, but also because a large swath of players will be gone by the next time we pick.”

Still, Flores stresses that the drop-off between his first and second picks didn’t change his approach. However, it allowed for a tweak in strategy, allowing for a more narrow pool of candidates when the Cardinals are on the clock.

“It changes the hours you put into certain spots of your meetings,” he said. “In 2017, we didn’t have a first- or second-round pick. Our meetings were just as long, but they focused on a wider net. Now with us only having (pick) seven, we have the same amount of hours that we can put into our meetings and time, but we split it up into a large chunk of a group of players that we normally would just canvass and say, ‘Well look, if one of those players gets to 21, we’re going to take him.’”

The last several months have presented a learning curve for Flores, who acknowledged the opportunity a top-10 pick represents to a franchise, but also hopes “to do everything we can to not pick up there again.” As he prepares for his most critical draft yet, he acknowledges the unpredictability of drafting in the top 10.

“What’s surprised me is that when we researched (top 10 picks), none of it is guaranteed,” Flores said. “You would think that if you roll out 10 picks and go back however long you want to research, you would assume that the hit rate on those is in order of magnitude greater than in actuality. But that’s how risky the baseball draft is.”

That sentiment may ring truer than ever this summer. Law described the 2024 draft class as “the worst MLB Draft class I’ve ever worked on, and certainly is the worst since the 2016 class.”

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t ample talent available in the first round, and Flores is eager to take advantage of the highest pick of his career.

“There is a tremendous opportunity when you’re able to get the right player at the right spot,” he said. “I think that the bucket of players that you’re swimming in is a little different than later in the draft.”

(Photo of Bryce Rainer from Harvard-Westlake: Tracy Proffitt / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)