ST. PETERSBURG — When asked to sum up the difference between attending last December’s winter meetings, when he was relatively new at his position, and this year, Matt Silverman borrowed a line often used by former Rays manager Joe Maddon:
“A mind once stretched never regains its past form.”
“We were stretched last year,” Silverman, Tampa Bay’s president of baseball operations, said Thursday. “We were challenged.”
Silverman, who replaced Andrew Friedman in October 2014, hired Kevin Cash to be his manager days before the meetings. Silverman and his staff had already begun work to overhaul the roster and used the 2014 meetings to set the groundwork for trading Wil Myers, Ben Zobrist and Yunel Escobar.