When the World Series concluded, it officially started the clock on the Sternberg/ Silverman/ Freidman/????(GM/Advisor)/????(Manager) Regime and started to give some of us Rays fans some reasons to be optimistic.
As of right now, we've interviewed 9 candidates for the manager job. Maddon, McLaren and Trammell are my personal Top 3 right now and are the most likely to be hired than the others. Maddon seems the most knowledgable of all the candidates and should be given an offer within the next week or 2. That's just me, though.
Also, we're in the process of hiring a GM/Senior baseball advisor(to the currently "Untitled" Freidman). Gerry Hunsicker and Billy Owens are the only 2 candidates who we've looked at so far and I believe newly-jobless Paul DePodesta should be looked at as well. If I were Stu, I'd try and go for the "Daily Double" and hire DePo as the GM and Billy Owens as the Asst. GM. We'd have 2 former Beane Prodigies in office and wouldn't need to spend too much money(which Stu would be happy about) to be able to contend. Also, we wouldn't force undue pressure on Friedman, with him having to learn quickly in order to become GM in a short timespan. We could hire DePo to a 4-5 year deal and by the time that contract expires, Freidman would be 32 and have a vast amount of baseball knowledge at his disposal. Then, we could keep DePo as a Senior Advisor and continue to use his services.
Also, Stu is soon to be receiving his first check from MLB(via those whose payrolls caused the "luxury tax" to be in effect). I believe that Stu will go against the former regime's habit of just pocketing it and will actually add some of that check to the money that he put aside for the payroll.
Stu has already announced that he will allow outside food or drinks in, he changed the ticket prices(which dropped the average ticket 50 cents) and that's in addition to the FREE PARKING that he announced in his initial press conference.
If you can't already tell, I'm starting to become a Pro-Sternberg Rays fan and hopefully he continues to give me reasons to like him and make me forget about all the deeds done in the past.