DETROIT — The Detroit Tigers were 55-63 entering Aug. 11 last year. They trailed the Twins by 10 games for a Wild Card berth and their playoff odds were at 0.2 percent, quite literally next-to-nothing.
They had already sold off at the trade deadline by the time they started winning, but a young core led them from fourth place in the division to a 31-13 finish to the season, during which they passed the Twins and gained a playoff berth in the process.
They haven’t stopped winning since.
They entered Friday 51-31, their record tied with the Los Angeles Dodgers for the best in the majors. And now, it appears, the American League Central runs through Detroit as the Tigers continue to surpass all of the external expectations set for them.
Where FanGraphs had the Twins’ playoff odds at 36.2 percent to win the division the day before the season began, ahead of the Tigers at 26.8 percent — and many betting sites had the Twins taking the division, too — the two teams have taken divergent paths this season and now it’s the Tigers that have emerged as the division’s top cat.
They began the day with a 9 1/2-game lead over second-place Cleveland and an 11 1/2-game lead over the Twins.
“I don’t like to sit here and heap compliments on other teams,” manager Rocco Baldelli said, before doing so. “They’ve done well in all facets and they’ve had some players that have developed very well and progressed and gotten better and better. They’re getting a lot out of a lot of different guys.”
Led by last year’s American League Cy Young Award winner, Tarik Skubal, whom the Twins are slated to see on Sunday night, the Tigers have been among the best pitching team’s in baseball. Their 3.46 earned-run average entering Friday was tied for sixth in the majors.
The team entered the day with a .747 team OPS, good for fifth in the majors. Riley Greene, the fifth overall pick in the 2019 draft, has led the way with a 2.6 bWAR (Wins Above Replacement per Baseball Reference). And after a dreadful year last season, which was interrupted by injuries, Javier Báez’s resurgence has been a major storyline.
“You (could) see the pieces they had,” Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers said. “I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what you were going to get out of some of the young hitters, some of the bullpen guys that no one had heard of before, but they’ve built a really good team over there and they’re playing really good ball.”
Twins opt against opener
The last time David Festa pitched, the Twins opted to start Danny Coulombe first, letting him face a pair of lefties near the top of the Milwaukee Brewers’ lineup.
Doing such a thing again, was a possibility, Baldelli acknowledged, especially with the lefties the Tigers have in their lineup, but after initially listing Friday’s starter as TBA, the Twins ended up opting for Festa.
“On days where we’re going to be deciding some things and deciding who’s going to start a given game for us, sometimes we need a little extra time,” Baldelli said. “That’s just normal. There’s nothing too different or crazy about that.”
Briefly
The Twins are offering a complimentary ticket to a future game for fans who purchased tickets for Thursday’s game, which was eventually played after being delayed by four hours and 22 minutes. It was the second-longest rain delay in Target Field history. … Bailey Ober will start Saturday’s game against the Tigers. He will be opposed by Casey Mize.
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LONDON (AP) — If world leaders were teaching a course on how to deal with U.S. President Donald Trump early in his second term, their lesson plan might go like this: Pile on the flattery. Don’t chase the policy rabbits he sends running across the world stage. Wait out the threats to see what, specifically, he wants, and when possible, find a way to deliver it.
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With every Oval Office meeting and summit, the leaders of other countries are settling on tactics and strategy in their pursuit of a working relationship with the emboldened American leader who presides over the world’s largest economy and commands its most powerful military. The results were there to see at NATO, where leaders heaped praise on Trump, shortened meetings and removed contentious subjects from the agenda.
Given that Trump dominates geopolitics, foreign leaders are learning from each other’s experiences dating to Trump’s first term, when he reportedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance. Among the learnable Trumpisms: He disdains traditional diplomacy. With him, it’s “ America first,” it’s superlative — and “ it’s not even close. ” He goes with his gut, and the world goes along for the ride.
They’re finding, for example, that the sheer pace of Trump’s orders, threats and social posts can send him pinging from the priority of one moment to another. He describes himself as “flexible” in negotiations, such as those in which he threatened big tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China only to back down during talks. And while Trump claimed credit for the ceasefire in the Iran-Israel war, he also has yet to negotiate ending the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza as promised.
Trump’s threat this week to levy retaliatory tariffs on Spain, for example, “is a mystery to everyone,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever told reporters Thursday during a summit in Brussels. If the tariffs never happen, he said, “It won’t be the first time that things don’t turn out as bad as they seem at first glance. Or that he changes his mind. I’m not the kind of leader who jumps every time Mr. Trump says something.”
Trump management 101: Discipline vs ‘daddy diplomacy’
Two summits this month, an ocean apart — the Group of Seven in Canada and NATO in The Netherlands — illustrate contrasting approaches to the American president on the brink of his 6th month back in office.
Meeting in mid-June in Alberta, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed Trump at a press conference by wishing him a happy birthday and adding a smidgen of flattery: “The G7 is nothing without U.S. leadership and your personal leadership of the United States.” But when Trump turned partisan, Carney cut off the event, saying: “We actually have to start the meeting.”
Trump appeared to nod in agreement. But later, on Monday, June 16, he abruptly departed the summit a day early as the conflict between Israel and Iran intensified.
Trump ordered U.S. pilots to drop 30,000-pound bombs early Sunday on two key underground uranium enrichment plants in Iran, and by Wednesday announced on social media “a Complete and Total ceasefire.” What followed was a 48-hour whirlwind during which Trump veered from elated to indignant to triumphant as his fragile Israel-Iran ceasefire agreement came together, teetered toward collapse and ultimately coalesced.
Trump publicly harangued the Israelis and Iranians with a level of pique and profanity that was notable even for him. Chiding the two countries for attacking each other beyond a deadline, he dropped the f-word. Not finished, he then cast doubt on his support for NATO’s mutual defense guarantee.
Such was the president’s mood as he winged toward a meeting of the trans-Atlantic alliance he had disparaged for years.
President Donald Trump poses for photographers as he arrives for a formal dinner at the Paleis Huis ten Bosch ahead of the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, right, attend a plenary session at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
President Donald Trump, center left, walks by Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, center front, prior to a group photo of NATO heads of state and government at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Secretary General Mark Rutte gestures during a meeting with President Donald Trump at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump, right, and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrive for a plenary session at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
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President Donald Trump poses for photographers as he arrives for a formal dinner at the Paleis Huis ten Bosch ahead of the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
NATO was ready for Trump with a summit set to please him
NATO is essentially American, anyway. The Europeans and Canadians cannot function without American heavy lift, air refueling, logistics and more. Most of all, they rely on the United States for its range of nuclear weapons for deterrence.
The June 25 summit was whittled down to a few hours, and one Trump-driven subject: Raising the amount of money the member nations spent on defense to lighten the load carried by the United States.
Emphatically not on the agenda: Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine. Trump did, however, meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has climbed his own learning curve on Trump management since Trump berated him in the Oval Office in February. The Ukrainian leader has deployed a conciliatory approach and mirrored Trump’s transactional style.
The goal, widely reported, was to avoid doing anything that might cause Trump to blow up the event or leave. Trump was invited to stay at the royal palace in The Hague and dine with the royal family. It was expected that most members would endorse the plan to raise their spending targets for their one-for-all defense against Russia.
The other NATO ambassadors had told Secretary-General Mark Rutte to deploy his Trump-whispering skills. He sent the president a private, presummit text predicting Trump would achieve “BIG” success there, which Trump posted on his own socials for all to see. At the summit, Rutte likened Trump’s role quieting the Iran-Israel war to a “daddy” interdicting a schoolyard brawl.
“He likes me,” Trump explained.
Backlash was stiff. Lithuania’s former foreign minister called Rutte’s approach “the gushings of weakness and meekness.”
“The wording appears to have been stolen from the adult entertainment industry,” Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted. “It reduces Europe to the state of a beggar — pitiful before our Transatlantic friends and Eastern opponents alike.”
It was the latest confirmation that complimenting is a favorite way for leaders to deal with him, if not a popular one in some circles.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been using the tactic since at least 2018, when he called Trump “the greatest friend Israel has ever had,” and even named a settlement in the Golan Heights after him. The late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plied him with multiple rounds of golf. French President Emmanuel Macron invited Trump to be the guest of honor at Bastille Day in 2017, featuring an elaborate military parade.
What Trump left behind
Rutte found a way to make Trump’s demand that member countries spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense work. Their military support to Ukraine could count as a substantial slice of that money. But the agreement left big issues unresolved, including a U.S. troop reduction that is likely to be announced later in the year, and the potential for a resulting security vacuum.
Posters on social media referred to NATO as the “North Atlantic Trump Organization.”
“This summit has all been about managing him, and it’s all been about trying to get him to say the right thing in the right moment,” Fiona Hill, a former senior White House national security adviser to three U.S. presidents, including Trump, told the BBC.
By the end of the summit, participants were declaring it a success as much for what it prevented as for what was accomplished. Trump showed up. He did not blow it up, leave early or start fights. And critically, NATO survived — indeed, with Trump declaring himself a changed man where the alliance is concerned.
And his night in the palace? He said he’d “slept beautifully.”
Associated Press reporters Lorne Cook in Brussels and Samya Kullab in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this story.
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Oslo police on Friday announced charges against Marius Borg Høiby, the eldest son of Norway’s crown princess, on multiple counts including rape, sexual assault and bodily harm after a monthslong investigation of a case that involved a “double-digit” number of alleged victims.
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Høiby, the 28-year-old son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit and stepson of the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Haakon, has been under scrutiny since he was repeatedly arrested in 2024 amid allegations of rape and on preliminary charges of bodily harm and criminal damage.
Oslo Police Attorney Andreas Kruszewski said that Høiby was cooperative during police questioning, which is now complete. Evidence in the case was drawn from sources including text messages, witness testimonies and police searches, the police attorney said.
The charges included one case of rape involving intercourse and two cases of rape without intercourse, four cases of sexual assault and two cases of bodily harm, Kruszewksi said at a news conference.
“I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number,” he said.
Defense attorney Petar Sekulic, in an email to The Associated Press, said Høiby was “absolutely taking the accusations very seriously, but doesn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing in most of the cases — especially the cases regarding sexual abuse and violence.”
The royal palace said “the case is proceeding through the legal system and is following normal procedures. We have nothing further to add.”
The case was top news in Norway, where the royals are popular.
Høiby previously lived with the royal couple and their two children, Princess Ingrid Alexandra and Prince Sverre Magnus, but now lives in a separate house nearby, according to Sekulic.
Høiby remains free pending a possible trial and is entitled to a presumption of innocence until a court rules otherwise.
Once known affectionately as “Little Marius,” Høiby grew up in the public eye enjoying the same wealth and privilege as his royal siblings, although his biological father, Morton Borg, served time in prison for drugs and violent offenses. Hoiby has acknowledged cocaine use and addiction.
Norway’s future queen made headlines in 2001 when she married Haakon, because she was a single mother who had lived a freewheeling life with a companion who had been convicted on drug charges.
The Susman Godfrey firm suggested that it had drawn Trump’s ire at least in part because it represented Dominion Voting Systems in the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News over false claims surrounding the 2020 presidential election. The suit ended in a massive settlement.
Other judges in recent weeks have blocked similar orders against the firms of Jenner Block, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale. The orders have sought to impose similar sanctions, including the suspension of security clearances of attorneys and the restriction of access to federal buildings.
“The order was one in a series attacking firms that had taken positions with which President Trump disagreed. In the ensuing months, every court to have considered a challenge to one of these orders has found grave constitutional violations and permanently enjoined enforcement of the order in full,” AliKhan wrote. “Today, this court follows suit, concluding that the order targeting Susman violates the U.S. Constitution and must be permanently enjoined.”
Other major firms have sought to avert orders by preemptively reaching settlements that require them, among other things, to collectively dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services in support of causes the Trump administration says it supports.
