CLEVELAND — The first two and a half weeks of Griffin Jax’s season couldn’t have been much more difficult for the reliever.

There was a game-tying home run — on a good pitch — in the ninth inning to Houston slugger Yordan Alvarez in early April. A costly error against Kansas City. Consecutive outings in which he gave up three and four runs.

For a reliever of Jax’s caliber — he has been among the best in the majors across the last couple of seasons — it wasn’t likely to last. And now, over his past four outings entering Wednesday, the right-hander has thrown four scoreless innings, striking out nine of the 15 batters he has faced.

“The season’s six months long,” Jax said. “Everybody’s going to go through stretches that don’t go their way. Just got to keep showing up and trust the work you put in.”

On April 22, manager Rocco Baldelli brought Jax in in the seventh inning for the first time. He has been used in the seventh three more times since then after primarily pitching in the eighth early in the season.

While Baldelli said he thought they would work Jax back into the eighth inning at some point soon, right now they’re seeing what they expected from the reliever.

“We moved him around a little bit, and I think it really allowed him to settle in,” Baldelli said. “He’s missing a bunch of bats right now. … Just the way he comes in the dugout after these outings, I think he feels pretty damn good about how he’s going right now.”

Jax finished last season with a 2.03 earned-run average across 71 innings. He struck out 95 batters, improving upon the good numbers he had put up for the past couple of seasons.

“A six-month season, there’s going to be periods of time where (expletive) happens every single day. It’s just how you bounce back,” Jax said. “Don’t let that bleed into the next day. Just believe in the stuff. It’ll carry you over. Obviously I’ve got a pretty good history of results so again, I’m just relying on that to carry me through and know that two-week sample is not going to define my season.”

Gasper leads off

Wednesday’s lineup in Cleveland had a little bit of a different look to it with infielder Kody Clemens making his first start for the Twins and Mickey Gasper, for the first time in his major league career, hitting leadoff.

After beginning the season with just two hits in his first 10 games (.111), Gasper was optioned to Triple-A. Heading into Wednesday, he had four hits in four games since his return as he has gotten more consistent playing time with a rash of injuries affecting other players.

Hitting leadoff, Gasper said, is just like leading off an inning. He has done it some in the minor leagues, he said, including last year at Triple-A.

“Leading off is just your first at-bat of the game,” Gasper said. “It doesn’t matter if it comes in the third or the first.”

Briefly

Simeon Woods Richardson will start in Thursday’s series finale, which is set for 12:10 p.m. CDT. He will be opposed by right-hander Ben Lively. Woods Richardson gave up one run in 5 1/3 innings the last time out.

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Former Vice President Kamala Harris plans to use a high-profile speech Wednesday to sharply criticize President Donald Trump amid speculation about whether she will mount another presidential campaign or opt to run for California governor.

Harris will address the 20th anniversary gala for Emerge America, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office that grew in part from Harris’ run for San Francisco district attorney in the early 2000s.

Her speech comes the day after Trump reached 100 days in office. It is expected to be her most extensive public remarks since leaving office in January following her defeat to Trump, with planned critiques of the Republican president’s handling of the economy, U.S. institutions and foreign policy.

Harris is ramping up her public presence as Democrats nationally search for a path forward after November’s election, in which Republicans also won control of Congress. While a slate of high-profile Democrats — from governors to businessmen — seek leadership roles within the party, the former vice president retains unique influence and would reshape any future race she chooses to enter.

Harris, a former state attorney general and U.S. senator from California, has not discouraged speculation that she might enter the race to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom, himself a potential contender for president. And she has not ruled out another run for the White House.

She continues to fundraise, using a joint committee that includes Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties. The committee, the Harris Victory Fund, reported having about $4.5 million on hand at the end of March, according to federal records.

In recent fundraising emails, Harris has been blunt about the need for Democrats to unify ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Democrats need to “organize and stop Trump’s agenda while electing Democrats everywhere,” she wrote in recent emails. “There has never been a more important time for a strong Democratic Party — one that is willing to stand up to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and what they are doing to this country.”

The event will mark a homecoming of sorts. Harris, who lives in Los Angeles, is from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Emerge America’s gala begins at 7 p.m. PDT. Harris’ speech will be livestreamed on the AP’s YouTube channel.

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The reasons for the moves were not immediately clear, though they come as the FBI under Director Kash Patel has been undertaking broad personnel changes and Deputy Director Dan Bongino has repeatedly sought to reassure supporters of President Donald Trump who are critical of the bureau.

“The Director and I are working on a number of significant initiatives to ensure that the mistakes of the past are never repeated, and that many of your open questions are answered,” Bongino wrote in one recent post on X, without elaborating.

The reassignments, first reported by CNN, were confirmed to The Associated Press by two people familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss non-public personnel moves. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

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The photographs at issue showed a group of agents taking a knee during a demonstration following the May 2020 killing of Floyd, which sparked widespread anger after millions of people saw video of his arrest. It led to a national reckoning over policing and racial injustice.

The kneeling angered some in the FBI but was also understood as a possible de-escalation tactic during a time of widespread protests, and the agents were not punished at the time.

Patel pledged at his January confirmation hearing that he would not “go backwards” in seeking retribution on perceived adversaries. But even before he was sworn in, there was concern that the Justice Department was poised to do exactly that, including by demanding a list of the thousands of agents who worked on investigations into the Jan. 6,2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, a request seen by some as a possible precursor to a purge at the bureau.

By REBECCA BOONE, Associated Press

A federal appeals court says it won’t lift restrictions on the access that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has to Social Security systems containing personal data on millions of Americans.

The full panel of judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 9-6 to keep the ruling from U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in place while DOGE pushes forward with an appeal. The appellate decision was released Wednesday.

Earlier this month Hollander issued a preliminary injunction in the case, which was brought by a group of labor unions and retirees who allege DOGE’s recent actions violate privacy laws and present massive information security risks.

Hollander said DOGE staffers could access data that has been redacted or stripped of anything personally identifiable, but only if they undergo training and background checks. She also said DOGE and its staffers must purge any of the non-anonymized Social Security data they have already obtained, and barred them from making any changes to the computer code used by the Social Security Administration.

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Attorneys representing DOGE had argued that anonymizing the data would be too burdensome, and disrupt the Trump administration’s efforts to root out any Social Security fraud.

Appellate Judge Robert B. King, writing for the majority, said DOGE wants “immediate and unfettered access” to all Social Security records, including “the highly sensitive personal information of essentially everyone in our Country,” like family court and school records, mental health and medical records of SSA disability recipients, and bank and earning information.

“All this highly sensitive information has long been handed over to SSA by the American people with every reason to believe that the information would be fiercely protected,” King wrote.

Appellate judge Julius Richardson, who voted against the majority ruling, said the case should have been handled by a smaller three-judge group rather than the full panel of active appellate judges. He also said the plaintiffs haven’t shown DOGE has actually snooped on any of their personal information, but instead are distressed by the possibility of “abstract harm.”