A few hours before Tuesday night’s game against the Atlanta Braves, Twins third baseman Royce Lewis was out taking ground balls in the infield — a regular occurrence. But this time, he was stationed on the other side of the infield.

Lewis has begun to take groundballs at second base, something he said he has done just a handful of times. He may see game action there. He may not.

“I would never close a door by saying no, it’s not going to happen,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “But it’s also far from a guarantee that we’ll see him in any games at second base this season. I think it’s a possibility. I would say that.”

Lewis has minimal experience at the position. He has worked primarily at shortstop and third base since he was drafted by the Twins in 2017. He also has gotten a taste of the outfield.

He has just one game of minor league experience at second that came in 2019, plus four games there in the Arizona Fall League the same year. So, the experience is pretty new to him.

“(It’s) totally different,” Lewis said. “It’s like if I were to bat righty and then one pitch later, go bat lefty.”

Lewis said learning to turn double plays would be the toughest part of the position, while noting that the shorter throws were a slightly easier element of second base.

Right now, he said, he’s just trying to get comfortable, put in the work and see what happens over there.

“If you take a baby out of its crib where it’s safe, it’s going to feel a little bit scared,” Lewis said. “That’s kind of where I’m at right now.”

But with more reps, he expects to feel more comfortable there. And even if the Twins, who are currently without injured infielders Carlos Correa and Brooks Lee, don’t play him there in a game, they think there’s a benefit to him getting his feet wet at second base.

“Truthfully, I think getting him some work over there can also help him mix up some of his throwing angles and different types of throws he has to make,” Baldelli said. “I think changing your eye line and sight line can sometimes help you with the position that you are playing. I think some of the work he’s putting in, it’s good for him to go over there and get those reps at second base. But also I think it can help him with his work at third, too.”

Ryan out for regular season

Joe Ryan has yet to start throwing a baseball since suffering a Grade 2 teres major strain on Aug. 7.

While the Twins did not say the starter wouldn’t pitch again in the regular season, they did transfer him to the 60-day injured list to clear a 40-man roster spot, which rules him out for a potential return late in the regular season.

Ryan said Tuesday his shoulder feels really good and that he has been “crushing the legs” and “getting good cardio in” so that if he were able to return in the postseason, the rest of his body would be ready.

“I don’t want there to be other things that are wrong or have to take more time to get back into the groove,” Ryan said. “Trying to mentally stay locked in and, yeah, we’ll see where it takes us.”

The good news, Ryan said, is that he has talked to others who have had a similar injury and they’ve suffered no longer-term effects. He received a second opinion on his shoulder, which confirmed the first one. This injury aside, everything else in his shoulder, he was told, looked great.

“I think in the long term, it’s … not really going to be an issue,” he said. “I’m confident in what we’re going to do here.”

Briefly

The Twins claimed reliever Michael Tonkin off of waivers for the second time this season. He is expected to be added to the active roster on Wednesday. … The Twins also selected the contract of Caleb Boushley and designated for assignment reliever Trevor Richards, their only trade deadline acquisition this season. Richards walked 11 batters and threw seven wild pitches in 13 innings after being acquired. “He still can do a lot of good things with the baseball, but he struggled with his command here,” Baldelli said. “It would not be honest to just ignore that point. It’s true. But I think you just sometimes have to make a challenging call.”  … Starting pitchers Simeon Woods Richardson and Spencer Schwellenbach made a unique bit of history on Tuesday. Statistics website Baseball Reference posted on X (formerly Twitter) said the pair formed the longest last name starting pitching matchup in its database.

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A plea deal is on the table for the son of a former St. Paul state representative accused of running a red light just off Interstate 35W in south Minneapolis last summer and crashing into a sedan, killing five young women.

At a Tuesday pretrial hearing in Hennepin County District Court, Assistant County Attorney Paige Starkey read in court the offer for Derrick John Thompson: A prison term between 32½ and nearly 39 years for pleading guilty to five counts of criminal vehicular homicide for causing a collision and leaving the scene.

Derrick John Thompson (Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office)

Meanwhile, five counts of criminal vehicular homicide for operating a vehicle in a grossly negligent manner would be dismissed under terms of the potential deal.

Starkey said Tuesday the plea offer will remain open until the next court date, which is set for Nov. 4. A trial, meanwhile, is scheduled to start Dec. 2.

Thompson, 28, of Brooklyn Park, did not speak at Tuesday’s hearing, which lasted just shy of seven minutes. His attorney didn’t say in court whether he would accept the plea deal.

The hearing was attended by family members and friends of the young women who died; some of them cried as they left the courtroom.

The charges say that Thompson sped through a red light at Lake Street and Second Avenue and struck a Honda Civic with five women inside just after 10 p.m. on June 16, 2023.

Pronounced dead at the scene were Salma Mohamed Abdikadir, 20, of St. Louis Park; Sabiriin Mohamoud Ali, 17, of Bloomington; Sahra Liban Gesaade, 20, of Brooklyn Center; Sagal Burhaan Hersi, 19, of Minneapolis; and Siham Adan Odhowa, 19, of Minneapolis. The young women had been returning from preparing for a friend’s wedding.

Thompson, who also faces federal charges in connection with the crash, is the son of former Minnesota Rep. John Thompson, who represented St. Paul’s East Side for one term beginning in 2021.

Derrick Thompson has been in federal custody at the Sherburne County Jail since Dec. 18, when he was arraigned in federal court. A jury trial in that case is scheduled for Oct. 7.

Clocked at 95 mph on highway

A Minnesota State Patrol trooper clocked Thompson driving a sport-utility vehicle 95 mph in a 55-mph zone about 10:10 p.m. just before the crash, according to the Hennepin County criminal complaint.

The complaint also alleges:

Before the trooper could catch up or turn on the squad’s emergency lights or sirens, Thompson “abruptly cut across all four lanes of traffic” and exited at Lake Street. Thompson drove down the exit ramp and through the intersection without stopping or slowing for the red light. The Honda had a green light and was traveling west on Lake Street.

Law enforcement found a rental car receipt on the ground outside the Cadillac SUV and it listed the renter as Derrick Thompson. Thompson rented the vehicle from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport about 25 minutes before the crash.

Left: Sagal Burhaan Hersi, 19, of Minneapolis, and Siham Adan Odhowa, 19, of Minneapolis. Top right: Sabiriin Mohamoud Ali, 17, of Bloomington . Bottom right: Sahra Liban Gesaade, 20, of Brooklyn Center, and Salma Mohamed Abdikadir, 20, of St. Louis Park. All five died when the driver of another vehicle crashed into their vehicle in Minneapolis on June 16, 2023. (Courtesy of the Dar Al Farooq Center)

In federal court, Thompson stands charged with intent to sell fentanyl and two counts related to illegal possession of a firearm. Both were allegedly found in the vehicle after the collision. If convicted, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and up to life in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota.

The county attorney’s office has not reached a “global resolution” with federal prosecutors, so the two cases remain separate “at this time,” Starkey said Tuesday. “I think that there’s a difference in terms of presumption on whether federal time is concurrent or consecutive,” she said.

In 2020, Thompson was convicted in California in a 2018 case, in which he fled from officers in a vehicle and struck a woman. She was in a coma for several weeks. He was on probation in the case at the time of the Minneapolis crash.

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A southern Minnesota dam and nearby bridge that almost collapsed in June after a bout of heavy rain and prompted a federal emergency declaration will be torn down, officials said Tuesday.

The Blue Earth County Board of Commissioners voted to remove the Rapidan Dam near the city of Mankato, about 80 miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and replace the County Road 9 bridge, both of which were at risk of crumbling. The officials jump-started what will likely be a yearslong rebuilding process as the structural integrity of the dam and bridge remain uncertain.

The Blue Earth River’s water levels rose dramatically in late June after heavy rain pummeled the Upper Midwest for days. While the structures held up in the end, floodwaters forged a new river channel around the dam and cut deeply into a steep riverbank, toppling utility poles, wrecking an Xcel Energy substation, swallowing a home and forcing the removal of a beloved store and eatery.

With the specter of a future collapse still on the minds of a wary local community, officials said they had to act in the name of public safety. But they are concerned about the bridge closure’s impact on local farmers, one of the rural area’s primary economic drivers.

“We know that this is a rural community and they use (the bridge) for getting farm to market, and we know the fall harvest is coming up and it’s going to be inconvenient,” said Jessica Anderson, a spokesperson for Blue Earth County. “But safety has been our priority from Day One. And we cannot afford to jeopardize that.”

This combination of satellite images provided by MaxarTechnologies shows views of the Rapidan Dam on Minnesota’s Blue Earth River, south of Mankato, on Sept. 6, 2011, top, and bottom on June 26, 2024, after floodwaters overcame parts of the structure following days of heavy rainfall. (Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies via AP)

Vance Stuehrenberg, a Blue Earth County commissioner, said farmers might have to travel upward of 45 minutes around the bridge to reach their fields.

Floodwaters washed away large amounts of sediment, causing instability to the bridge’s supporting piers, built atop sandstone bedrock. The timeline for rebuilding it is unclear, but Anderson said it would be a matter of “years, not months.”

It was also unclear Tuesday how much the rebuilding will cost. Studies commissioned by the county in 2021 found repairing the dam would cost $15 million and removing it would cost $82 million, but Anderson said environmental conditions have changed since then when the sediment was washed downstream.

The next step will be securing funding to finance the repairs, which could come from a combination of state and federal sources. The county is working to develop a plan with federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Anderson said.

A federal disaster declaration was approved for Blue Earth County, and local officials said the additional resources will be critical for rebuilding efforts.

Stuehrenberg is also concerned about the impact the closure could have on recreation opportunities near the dam, which is a popular area for bike riding. Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, who visited the dam during the flooding, is among those who used to ride his bike on a nearby trail when he lived in Mankato.

The Rapidan Dam is over a century old, finished in 1910. While it was built to generate electricity, it has been damaged by several rounds of flooding in recent decades. The dam hasn’t been producing power, as previous floods knocked out that small source of revenue.

There are roughly 90,000 significant dams in the U.S. At least 4,000 are in poor or unsatisfactory condition and could kill people and harm the environment if they failed, according to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They need inspections, upgrades and even emergency repairs.

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