The recent flurry of matchups between the Dodgers and Padres have been enthralling. That’s what transpires when two teams of similar caliber go head-to-head – both clubs feature impressive lineups, employ the league’s best starters, and have quality bullpens and bench options to maintain the tension in later innings. They also both possess good front offices. The Dodgers have long been at the sabermetric forefront, while the Padres have strengthened their analytics department over the last few years. They share multiple characteristics, and not surprisingly, both teams excel.

However, the intrastate rivals do disagree on one major aspect of the modern game: infield shifts. Since last year, the Dodgers have applied the shift in 58.0% of opportunities, a league-leading rate over that span. In contrast, the Padres have done so just 21.5% of time. Only the Cardinals and Braves, two teams that are notably shift-averse, recorded lower rates.

What’s interesting, though, is that this isn’t because the Padres dislike the shift. Let’s dig a bit deeper. The Dodgers are what you would call equal-opportunity shifters – that is, they don’t discriminate between left- and right-handed hitters. Of their 6,729 shifts during the aforementioned time span, 3,210 (47.7%) of them were against the former. (Here I should clarify that I’m only factoring in Baseball Savant’s shifts, not strategic alignments, to simplify the analysis.)

Ok, now for San Diego. Their total of 2,608 shifts is much lower, but, and I kid you not, 2,524 (96.8%) of them were against left-handed hitters! And no, the Padres didn’t stumble into this. The gap between them and second place, the Rockies, is about 18 percentage points. There’s clear intent here, which looks even more impressive on a graph:

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Yesterday Jon Sciambi shared a tweet with a few, seemingly impossible stats:

MLB slash into today 232/310/390…BA would be lowest ever…in 2008 about 42% of swings put balls in play, this year 35.4%. In 08 the swing/miss % was 20% and this year it is 27.3%. Yikes.

— Jon Sciambi (@GoGala__Games) April 26, 2021

Yikes indeed. While all of those numbers are concerning on their own, it’s actually the batting average figure that most struck me. If a .232 league batting average sounds absurdly low to you, you’re not wrong. In fact, it’s the lowest since at least the turn of the twentieth century. The .232 mark is five points worse than the league hit in 1968, when Bob Gibson spun a 1.12 ERA, only one American Leaguer managed to hit .300, and nearly a quarter of the season’s games ended in a shutout. It’s also seven points lower than the worst collective batting average of the Dead Ball Era, a year the league slugged .305. And it’s far, far lower than anything in recent memory:

Say what you will about Three True Outcomes baseball, a batting average this low is a bit of a problem. And while the magnitude of the problem may come as a bit of a shock, the “why” is pretty easy to explain.

Much of it can be attributed to strikeouts, of course. Pitchers are fanning their opponents 24.6% of the time, up from 23.4% in last year’s shortened season. Strikeout rates seemingly only go up each year, but it’s worth noting that this is a pretty dramatic uptick even by that standard, easily the largest year-over-year we’ve seen this century. (Hat tip to Marc Webster for noticing.) Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers are relying on their best pitches more and more. And why should they not? It makes all the sense in the world. Throwing a fastball 60% of the time just so that you can “establish it” is an outdated moniker that players and teams alike are reticent to follow. Take a look at the our season stat grid tool if you want proof that the most dominant pitchers in the league are increasingly relying on their breaking pitches. Select curveballs and you will see Julio Urías, Zack Greinke, Brandon Woodruff, Anthony DeSclafani, Dylan Bundy, Walker Buehler, Corbin Burnes, and John Means toward the top of the list. For sliders, that list features Tyler Glasnow, Lance McCullers Jr. (who is also throwing a new slider), Shane Bieber, a new and improved Jeff Hoffman, Freddy Peralta, and even Clayton Kershaw, whose slider is almost 45% of his pitch diet.

These are cherrypicked examples; not every pitcher on this leaderboard has been as productive as those starters thus far. But it does point to the idea that the best pitchers MLB has to offer are increasingly leaning into their best secondary offerings and have either continued to be successful or found another level in their production.

The idea of simply throwing your best pitch has become more in vogue in recent years. Back in 2017, Eno Sarris wrote that pitchers should try making breaking balls 80% of their total pitch mix. Part of the reason is that non-fastball pitches, specifically breaking balls, have gotten increasingly harder to hit; Ben Clemens wrote about this trend a couple of years ago. Even though fastballs have become harder to hit by virtue of increased velocity, pitchers are turning away from them in favor of other offerings.

This decision raises the question: Are pitchers successful with their non-fastball pitches because they use them less? The idea is that the main driver of offspeed or breaking ball success would be that hitters see them less, making them tougher to adjust to in a plate appearance. Theoretically, then, if a pitcher goes primarily to his secondary pitches, those pitches will become less effective on a per pitch basis. Is this true?

To investigate, I took every pitch type that was thrown at least 100 times in a season from 2018 through ’20. I took the year-over-year changes in pitch usage, swinging-strike rate, and run value per 100 pitches thrown for each season pair (where in both seasons the pitch was thrown on 100-plus occasions).

The first thing I wanted to look at was effectiveness based on changes in usage for each individual pitch type. The short answer to this is that there is little relationship between marginal usage change and marginal success in either of the two measures for any pitch type.

If anything, changeups and curveballs actually induce swinging strikes as a higher percentage of all pitches with more usage. That is the strongest relationship in this dataset, and it still consists mostly of noise. Based on the data, there is no evidence that pitchers should be dissuaded from throwing their best pitches more often, and that holds true for breaking balls, offspeed pitches, and fastballs.

Sure, you may argue, throwing any pitch a little more won’t have adverse effects on its effectiveness, but aren’t there diminishing returns? At a certain point, don’t you throw the pitch too often to fool the batter? To answer that, I placed each pitcher and pitch type pair into a bucket based on usage, then separated the bucket into increments of 10% (so the first consisted of pitches thrown between 0 and 10% of the time, the second 10% and 20%, etc.). I then grouped the pitch usages across the three seasons and looked for any potential deviations in effectiveness.

Again, these relationships are mostly noise. Even for pitches thrown upwards of 70% to 80% of the time (beyond which the the data is scarce), they should not lose any per-pitch potency by virtue of increased predictability.

For those of you skeptical that fastballs make up the majority of pitches and that this lack of a relationship may not be evident with breaking balls or offspeed pitches specifically, I have bad news for you:

As with run values, there’s no strong relationship between swinging-strike rate and usage.

As noted above, fastball usage is on the decline throughout the league. But using the data I collected from ’18 through ’20, it’s clear that pitchers aren’t all now throwing breaking pitches all the time.

The vertical lines represent the 50th percentile in that specific distribution. On average, pitchers using a certain breaking ball less than 30% of the time shied away from using the pitch more. On the other hand, breaking ball usage mostly increased for players who used it more than a cursory amount. That all makes sense: If you have a breaking ball you like to use (or are comfortable using), you’re going to throw it more; if you don’t have a strong breaking pitch, then you’re not going to be tossing it all the time even if it could theoretically be more effective.

Throwing a pitch just for the sake of throwing it is not going to fly in MLB in 2021. Pitches are thrown with a purpose: generating whiffs, or at least groundballs. This is one of the fundamental factors in the ever-increasing strikeout rate: Not only are pitchers throwing harder than ever, but they are also leaning on their best stuff even more. That’s while every one of those pitches is being optimized with the help of technology to generate maximum movement and deception. And that trend will not stop until there is evidence that a pitch will perform worse upon increased usage. Barring that, pitchers across the league will rely on the pitches they deem most dominant.

More than anything else, I’ll remember Carlos Rodón’s no-hitter for how it ended. Not when he hit Roberto Pérez in the foot — that was no fun, but perfect games end on nonsense all the time — but because he threw harder as the game went on, topping out at 99 mph on his 110th pitch of the game. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that he started the game in the low 90s.

Pitchers losing velocity as the game goes on is a phenomenon as old as baseball itself. That’s just how it works; throwing a pitch requires a ton of physical effort, and doing it 100 times will wear you down. If you’ve ever done repetitions of anything in your life, you can empathize. Rodón laughs at that fact of life, in a way that I think of as Justin Verlander-esque, and I was curious whether other pitchers follow the same pattern, particularly after Jacob deGrom popped a casual 101 mph fastball in the seventh inning of his latest start.

Using deGrom as evidence of anything is an iffy idea at best — the man is a unicorn, a pitching deity descended to earth. But Rodón is mortal, and he does it, so it’s hardly some unobtainable goal. I set out to see whether pitchers are adding velocity in later innings these days, and whether that addition has changed over time. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday night, Jacob deGrom pitched brilliantly against the Nationals in what was the best start of his career: nine innings, just two hits allowed, no runs, no walks, and 15 strikeouts. By traditional game score, his outing was the finest pitching performance of the young 2021 season, at a cool 98.

There’s a lot to marvel at with deGrom. He has a 0.31 ERA and 0.85 FIP through four starts and is leading all of baseball in WAR. What’s interesting to me, though, is how he attacks the strike zone. His 4.5-point increase in overall Zone% might look modest on the surface, but that’s not always the best measure of aggression: Pitchers frequently want hitters to go fishing. What’s more interesting is that his four-seam fastball zone rate has jumped by 10 points year-over-year, good for the second-largest increase in baseball. deGrom dares hitters to hit his 100 mph fastball, and, well, they just can’t.

This is not solely an investigation into deGrom; he is just emblematic of what might be a league-wide trend. Through games played on April 24, 55% of four-seam fastballs were in the strike zone — a figure that, if it holds, would mark the highest four-seam Zone% of the pitch tracking era. Though more four-seam fastballs have been thrown in the strike zone in recent years, 2021 represents a statistically significant tick up, with a p-value of practically zero.

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The end of April always sees some teams with their hands hovering above the panic button, some pitchers wondering what the heck is happening, and others hoping their newfound glory is more than just a phase. As the month comes to a close, we’ll see all of those tropes beautifully on display. Here are the week’s best matchups.

Tuesday, April 27, 6:10 PM ET: Kenta Maeda vs. Aaron Civale

Heading into the season, three AL Central teams had playoff odds above 24%. Nearly a month into things, two of those teams are struggling with losing records (Minnesota and Cleveland), while the Royals, who had the fourth-lowest playoff odds of any AL team, are the surprise of the spring. This week brings the first Minnesota-Cleveland series of the year as both sides try to find their mojo. On Tuesday, they’ll each turn to guys with a wide array of pitches who currently occupy different ends of the success spectrum.

One year removed from finishing second in Cy Young voting and AL starter WAR, Kenta Maeda is searching for answers. He’s only seen the sixth inning once in his four starts this year, going exactly 6.0 innings in a game against the clawless Tigers. He’s had two starts flame out at 4.1 innings; his other outing was a meltdown at the Coliseum on April 21. The A’s clobbered three home runs, whacked five balls with exit velocities above 100 mph, plated seven earned runs, and hooked him after three innings.

Those big-time exit velocities are becoming a troubling trend for Maeda, a pitcher who thrived in his first five major league seasons by limiting hard contact. According to Statcast, Maeda had the lowest average exit velocity among all starters from 2015-20 who threw at least 500 innings. Today, he’s floundering in the 28th percentile for average exit velocity and the 29th percentile for hard-hit percentage, partially due to the fact that his four-seam fastball just flat out ain’t working.

Last season, when Maeda had the lowest average exit velocity of any starter and the highest K% of his career, hitters flailed their way to a .086 batting average and .103 wOBA (.150 xwOBA) on his fastball. The average exit velocity against that pitch (83.4 mph) was even weaker than his league-leading overall average (85.3). This year, that’s all gone awry. His fastball is getting lit up for a .313 average and .372 wOBA (.430 xwOBA). He even allowed a home run on the fastball for the first time in his Twins tenure. This Matt Olson skyscraper, measured at 107.8 mph on a middle-middle meatball, is a perfect encapsulation of how things are going for Maeda when his catcher puts down one finger.

Aaron Civale, on the other hand, has taken the thump out of opponents’ bats. Cleveland’s third-year righty is in the 88th percentile of exit velocity, and his heater is the one steadying the ship. As Devan Fink laid out, Civale has overhauled everything, mainly his philosophy on fastballs. After throwing a four-seam 2.5% of the time in 2020, he’s shot that percentage all the way up near 30.

It’s now Civale’s turn for a tour of the exit velocity leaderboard. His revamped changeup – which, as Devan also mentioned, is now a split-change – is working so well that he may even want to consider upping its dosage. The split-change is sending everyone back to the dugout having made weak contact (or no contact at all), but particularly left-handers, who have yet to record an extra base hit, and are slap boxing a 78.0 average exit velocity against this diverting action.

Like a scrap-hungry seagull or a fan with the day off tomorrow, Civale is also sticking around late into the game. As opposed to Maeda, Civale has pitched into the sixth inning in each of his starts, twice going seven frames or longer. With both teams looking to course-correct after chumpish starts, and the Royals’ making things even more crowded in the Central, Tuesday’s Maeda-Civale ticket is one to pinpoint.

Friday, April 30, 9:40 PM ET: John Means vs. Jesús Luzardo

Fresh off a resounding 8-1 win that ended Oakland’s 13-game winning streak, the Orioles meet the A’s for a second straight weekend series. John Means will attempt to keep Oakland earth-bound on Friday, matched up with the same youngster he defeated last time out. Means and Luzardo had a timeshare of the strike zone when they last linked up, pouring in strikes on over 60% of their identical 101 pitch counts.

Means has stuck to the same script for virtually his entire career, though this season he’s relegating his slider from supporting actor to bit part. With roughly 10 mph separating his fastball and changeup – Means’ most common offerings – the rock of the Orioles’ rotation is letting those two do the lion’s share of the work. Eighty-three of his 101 pitches in the clubs’ first meeting were either a fastball or changeup, and the A’s could only scrape together two hits in 6.1 innings. Will Means follow the same path when they collide this weekend, or will he try to confound Oakland by peppering in more sliders and curves?

Both pitchers will throw their fastballs more often than not, though they use different lanes of the highway. Per Baseball Savant, Luzardo was responsible for each of the 23 highest-velocity pitches in Sunday’s game against Means, topping out just a hair under 98 mph.

The Athletics’ Peruvian prodigy took the L thanks to Austin Hays’ two home runs, giving Luzardo five gopher balls in 25 innings, all provided by right-handed hitters. Since his big-league career began in 2019, Luzardo has allowed 15 home runs, 14 of which have come from the right side of the batter’s box. (To satiate your daily need for useless trivia, the only lefty to take Luzardo deep is Mariners’ 28-year-old rookie José Marmolejos.) Don’t let the Orioles band of nameless, faceless offensive players fool you. Though they’ve managed just one souvenir shot against lefties this season, Baltimore’s left-handed hitters are fifth in wRC+ against same-handed pitchers.

Friday, April 30, 9:40 PM ET: Jon Gray vs. Madison Bumgarner

Friday evening will be extremely conducive to the two-screen lifestyle, as Gray vs. Bumgarner gets underway at the same time as Means vs. Luzardo. Both of these towering NL West staples are intimately familiar with their opponent. Gray has tussled with the Diamondbacks 13 times in his seven-year career while Bumgarner’s career stats against the Rockies read like a full season for a 1960’s workhorse: 37 starts, 230.1 innings, 218 strikeouts, 62 walks. Despite inhabiting the same division as Bumgarner for his whole career, Gray has only matched up with the inimitable lefty twice. Entering round three, both guys are hot.

Gray shut out the non-Bryce Harper parts of Philadelphia’s lineup on Sunday, allowing just two runs on a pair of solo shots to the Phillies’ right fielder. Though he’s running the first double-digit walk rate of his career, Gray is doing well at keeping those base on balls from becoming runs. His 85.8 LOB% will surely come down, and his .208 BABIP will likely come up, but there are some encouraging trends that suggest Gray’s early-season fortune could be here to stay.

Keeping balls on the ground means they can’t be added to the collection of Coors Field moon shots, and Gray has gotten his groundball percentage back above 50%, much more in line with his 46.6% career average than the 36.7% outlier from last season. The Rockies also have to love their ace’s hard-hit rate, as it mirrors the numbers he maintained in 2016-17, the only seasons he’s eclipsed 3.0 WAR. So far Gray has been riding the slider – a pitch that’s been his best since 2019 – until the wheels fall off. Hitters began whiffing on it 40% of the time during that 2019 breakthrough, and this year they’re hardly faring any better, swinging and missing at a 42.5% clip and striking out in 19 of the 51 plate appearances that have ended with this unrighteous pitch.

The desert faithful will get their first look at Bumgarner since his seven-inning no-hitter. The zero hits part jumps out of the box score, but Sunday’s shortened no-no was also MadBum’s best all-around game as a Diamondback. It was his first start for Arizona without a walk, and he matched his Diamondback-high with seven strikeouts. Bumgarner generated 10 swings and misses on his cutter and curveball, the latter of which is quickly becoming an essential out pitch. With a Whiff% of 40.0 (and a staggering 75.0 against lefties), Uncle Charlie is bringing gifts every time he visits Bumgarner.

This could spell doom for Ryan McMahon, the Rockies’ left-handed hitting outfielder who’s carrying around an 0-for-10 with three strikeouts against the legendary lefty. Trevor Story, the only current Rockie with more than 18 plate appearances against Bumgarner, has also had a bad time. His 8-for-41 (.195/.233/.561) numbers are hilariously heightened by the fact that five of those hits have landed in the seats.

Under the Radar Matchup – Friday, April 30, 8:05 PM ET: Nathan Eovaldi vs. Kohei Arihara

Here’s the situation: Eovaldi has one of the lowest barrel percentages of any starter; Arihara has one of the highest. Unsurprisingly, Eovaldi has been one of the more valuable pitchers around, becoming one of the first American League hurlers to hit 1.0 WAR. He’s done it by converting to the church of groundballs, getting disgusting ride on his fastball, and harnessing a curveball that’s experienced a 180-degree turnaround in just two years.

As recently as 2019, Nathan Eovaldi was downright bad, trying to smile through the pain of home runs and walks. That is no longer the case, as Eovaldi is working on a streak of 42.2 consecutive innings without allowing a dinger, and his walk rate is a microscopic 4.2%, down from the 11.6% that severely hampered him two years ago.

While Eovaldi’s aversion to hard contact has very plainly made him Boston’s best pitcher, his Friday counterpart’s success has been much more confusing. Arihara was managing a 2.21 ERA (3.05 FIP) heading into his last start despite constantly getting hit on the thick part of the bat. After coming over from Japan on a two-year pact with the Rangers, Arihara experienced unbelievable luck through his first four starts until stopping by Guaranteed Rate Field on Sunday. His 93.9 EV (highest of any starting pitcher), 12.9% Barrel% (fifth-highest), and 50.0% HardHit% (tied for highest in the league), tell us that hitters are having a very easy time squaring him up. Yet, he went longer than five innings with zero earned runs in his two previous starts before getting beat up by the White Sox in his worst showing to date, pushing his ERA to 4.03 (4.17 FIP). Even after getting his “Welcome to MLB” moment in Chicago, Arihara still has a HR/9 under 1.00 and is feeding groundballs to 40.6% of his adversaries.

His teammate Mike Foltynewicz, who has the dubious distinction of being neck-and-neck with Arihara on HardHit Mountain, has a 5.32 ERA, 6.78 FIP, and leads the world in home runs allowed. Baseball is hard and unfair.

On Sunday, Madison Bumgarner did what the Padres’ Joe Musgrove and the White Sox’s Carlos Rodón have already done this season: he pitched a game to its scheduled completion without allowing any hits. Yet the 31-year-old Diamondbacks lefty won’t get credit for an official no-hitter because his sterling effort took place in a seven-inning doubleheader game — oddly enough, the nightcap of a twin bill that began with teammate Zac Gallen holding the Braves to a single hit.

Because Saturday night’s game at Truist Park was postponed due to inclement weather, the Diamondbacks and Braves met for the season’s 21st doubleheader, playing under the rules put in place early in the 2020 season as a means of helping teams make up postponements in expeditious fashion, particularly COVID-19-related ones. The rule was then carried over into this season as part of this year’s health and safety protocols. In the opener, Gallen allowed only a sixth-inning single to Freddie Freeman, and afterwards waved off the thought of how his achievement would have been viewed if not for Freeman’s hit:

“Yeah, I didn’t know that it didn’t count, but it wouldn’t have really counted in my book anyway,” Gallen said. “[D-backs catcher Stephen Vogt] after was like, ‘Man, that would have been sick,’ and I was like, ‘Forget that, I want to get a legit one.’”

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Another week of the 2021 season is in the books and it was a wild one. The A’s finally lost a game, the Reds couldn’t win one, and the Dodgers and Padres played playoff-esque baseball in a drama-filled four-game series over the weekend. Here’s the second week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking. Since we’re so early in the season, teams will move up and down the rankings pretty dramatically if they have a particularly good or bad week.

The same two teams sit atop the rankings but they’ve switched positions. Neither team had an outstanding week — both teams split a series against the Mariners but the Dodgers lost their four-game set against the Padres after a wild Sunday night game that went to 11 innings.

The Red Sox now have the best offense in baseball and Eduardo Rodriguez has turned in two fantastic starts to help their rotation gain ground in the rankings. After developing a case of myocarditis — an inflammation of the heart muscle — brought on by contracting COVID-19, there was no way to know what to expect from Rodriguez this season but he’s picked up right where he left off after his breakout season in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me get this out of the way: Nick Madrigal is really good at baseball. Or at least, he’s really good at one aspect of it, and that aspect is one of the most important ones. Madrigal’s bat control is borderline otherworldly. Per FanGraphs’ measurements, Madrigal entered Sunday’s contest with a 100% in-zone contact rate. 100%! That’s zero swings and misses in the zone. Nearly 20 games into the season, that’s a remarkable achievement. Arguably more impressive is his 90.2% contact rate out of the zone. When he chases, he still hits the ball. Currently, only 31 qualified hitters have a higher in-zone contact rate than Madrigal has when leaving it. In terms of putting the bat on the baseball, Madrigal is a pure 80. It’s an amazing ability, and it’s one reason that, barring injury, it’s easy to see him hitting .300 or better for the next decade or more.

The question is how valuable can Madrigal be beyond his remarkable ability to make contact. He’s the ultimate “empty average” guy due to an aggressive approach and a complete lack of power. Entering Sunday’s game, Madrigal is a .327 hitter in his young, 47-game career. He has a .757 OPS to go along with that. Again good, but not as good as you’d expect from someone challenging for a batting title. ZIPS sees the weird combination of plusses and minuses and has Madrigal peaking at 2.3 WAR with a 101 OPS+. In order to go from good to really good, Madrigal is going to have to either walk more or hit balls harder, and he has a harder path than most in terms of making either happen.

Scouts call players like Madrigal “early action” players. Swing at a lot of pitches, make a ton of contact. That’s Madrigal in a nutshell. He’s not going to walk, and he’s not going to strike out. In fact, he’s going to do those two things less often than anyone in the game. We’re all familiar with walk and strikeout percentages, but what happens when we combine them? Let’s call it Early Action Percentage:

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Tim Mead announced earlier this month that he’ll be stepping down as President of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in mid-May. Who will replace Mead in that prestigious position is unknown, and to my knowledge no names have been bandied about beyond Cooperstown itself. That being the case — and with the caveat that some are less practical than others, for a variety of reasons — let’s consider a few potential candidates.

John Thorn was the first person that came to mind when this subject was presented to me recently. Currently the Official Historian for Major League Baseball, Thorn checks all of the boxes, with one possible exception. At age 73, he doesn’t profile as a long-term fit in that role. (The soon-to-be-departing Mead — formerly the Vice President of Communications for the Los Angeles Angels — is 62, while his predecessor, Jeff Idelson, is now 56.)

Josh Rawitch. who serves as Senior Vice President, Content & Communications for the Arizona Diamondbacks, strikes me as an intriguing possibility. A 1998 graduate of Indiana University, Rawitch has held multiple positions in baseball and is also an adjunct professor at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Unlike Thorn, he would profile as a long-term fit.

SABR CEO Scott Bush would likewise qualify as a long-term option. Formerly the Senior Vice President for Business Development with the Goldklang Group, as well as an Assistant General Manager for the St. Paul Saints, the 38-year-old Bush has a business background other candidates may lack. Read the rest of this entry »