KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Twins and Pablo López were in the infancy stages of their relationship when the two sides decided to commit to each other long term.

López had spent months learning about his new organization. He saw how many staff members were from Minnesota, how long they had been a part of the organization. He noticed all the Twins legends — like Bert Blyleven, Joe Mauer and his childhood hero, Johan Santana — who still hung around, long after their playing careers had ended. He felt, very quickly, that the entire organization was built on family values.

The Twins had spent those same months learning about López, whom they acquired in a trade in January 2023. They noted his work ethic, how he was the first one in the building. His makeup was off the charts. His ability was, too.

On April 21, the Twins officially announced they had signed López to a four-year contract extension worth $73.5 million. They had never given a pitcher that much money in franchise history.

But this, they believed, was the right pitcher — and person — to invest in.

The extension kicks in this year, and López, who will take the ball on Thursday afternoon for Opening Day against the Kansas City Royals and lead the Twins into the 2024 season, is out to prove he’s worth every penny.

“It meant a lot to me,” López said. “Every time teams are willing to make investments in players … there’s responsibility that comes with it, but there’s the aspect like it’s a mutual decision to have a relationship, a long-lasting one that hopefully we can turn into something special and we’re able to then accomplish a lot of things on the field.”

López already knew what the Twins thought of him. When they traded Luis Arraez, the reigning American League batting champion, to the Miami Marlins to get him, it told him how highly they valued him and instilled some confidence in him, as well.

“That already made me aware of, ‘OK, these people must see something in me. They have to be mindful of something that maybe I’m not mindful of right now,’ ” López said.

The Twins believed that they had acquired one of the best pitchers in baseball.

They worked with him to introduce a sweeper, an offering that quickly became one of his most effective pitches (opponents hit just .173 against it last year). They showed their faith in him once more by naming him the 2023 Opening Day starter for the first time in his career. He responded with 5 1/3 scoreless innings against the Royals, striking out eight.

Just a few weeks into the regular season, the two sides came to their agreement.

“You’re not going to make that kind of investment in someone, especially before you have to, unless you feel very highly about their ability. But when you combine the ability with really very much absolute, top-of-the-scale character and makeup and work ethic and desire and all of these other factors, then it actually became a pretty easy decision on our end,” manager Rocco Baldelli said.

All of these “other factors” quickly became apparent once coaches and teammates started spending time around him. They saw how he meticulously planned, how he set his schedule and the executed it to a T. Everything he did was intentional and aimed at improvement.

“He works harder than anybody. This guy is the first one to show up to the clubhouse every day and the last one to leave, and I really mean that,” shortstop Carlos Correa said. “A lot of people say that just to say it, but it’s true. I show up early, and when I think I’m too early, he’s already sweating.”

That work ethic might have even kicked into overdrive after signing the extension. Lopez couldn’t help but put some extra pressure on himself. He felt the need to justify the team’s investment in him.

As a self-proclaimed overthinker, the Twins’ ace said he “went down that hole” and had to remind himself that the job hadn’t changed and neither should he.

The only thing that changed was that he and his wife, Kaylee, had the certainty of knowing where they would be living, a luxury in an industry in which players are constantly on the move.

“I really had to understand, take a step back and realize it’s just a very beautiful opportunity to come to the field with a little less pressure on things that take a lot of toll on our minds sometimes and then obviously come to the field and just play the game a little more freely,” López said. “Now I get to focus more attention to my craft, to what I do on the mound.”

And what that is, is being one of the best pitchers in baseball.

In his first year in Minnesota, López posted a 3.66 earned-run average in 194 innings. He finished the year tied for third in the majors with 234 strikeouts, and helped lead the Twins in the postseason, giving up one run across 12 2/3 innings in the two games he started.

Last year, he finished the season seventh in American League Cy Young voting. This year, he’s among the favorites to win the award, which would further cement him as one the sport’s elite.

“Most decisions that are going to cost you a lot of money are difficult decisions,” Baldelli said of Lopez’s extension. “I think that was probably one of the easiest decisions that we made to invest in a person like Pablo López, who also happens to be one of the best pitchers anywhere.”

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The Gophers men’s basketball program is expected to welcome former North Dakota State big man Andrew Morgan for a visit to campus this week.

Morgan is the one guest the U have scheduled as of Wednesday afternoon, a source told the Pioneer Press.

Morgan, a to-be senior from Waseca, Minn., has one year of eligibly remaining after entering the NCAA transfer portal this week.

At 6-foot-10 and 245 pounds, Morgan averaged 12.9 points and 5.0 rebounds in 32 games, 29 starts, for the Bison in the Summit League last season. He was named second team all-conference in 2023-24.

Morgan averaged only 0.3 blocks per game and only 1.0 3-point attempt per game but made 36 percent from deep last season. He shot 58 percent from inside the arc a year ago.

His stiffest completion came against Creighton last November. He scored nine points on 4 for 14 from the field, with one rebound, one assist and two steals in 23 minutes in a loss.

Morgan, a Mr. Basketball finalist in Minnesota in 2020-21, would factor in as a back-up center to rising junior Pharrel Payne, with last year’s reserve Jack Wilson out of eligibility.

The Gophers currently have one vacant scholarship spot with sophomore forward Josh Ola-Joseph entering the NCAA transfer portal on Wednesday.

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By ERIC TUCKER (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The case against Donald Trump seemed relatively straightforward in August 2022 when FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate, with authorities citing evidence that the former president hoarded enough classified documents to fill dozens of boxes and obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them.

But nine months after he was indicted, there are mounting doubts that the case can reach trial this year.

The Trump-appointed judge in the case has yet to set a firm trial date despite holding two hours-long hearings with lawyers this month. Multiple motions to dismiss the case are still pending, disputes over classified evidence have spanned months and a bitterly contested defense request to disclose the names of government witnesses remains unresolved. Complicating matters further is a recent order suggesting that the judge, Aileen Cannon, is still entertaining a Trump team claim about his rightful possession of the documents that she had appeared openly skeptical of days earlier.

“This does seem to be moving more slowly and less sequentially than other cases that I have seen” concerning classified information, said David Aaron, a former Justice Department national security prosecutor.

To a certain extent, the delays are the product of a broader Trump team strategy to postpone the four criminal cases confronting the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s presidential race. But the case in Florida is unique because of the startlingly few substantive decisions that have been made to move closer to a trial. That raises the prospect that a resolution in the case may be unlikely before this year’s presidential election. If he were to win the White House, Trump could appoint an attorney general who would dismiss the federal charges against him in Florida and other jurisdictions.

Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team have strenuously fought to press the case forward. Though they’ve taken care not to mention the upcoming election, they’ve repeatedly cited a public interest in getting the case resolved quickly and have pointed to what they say is overwhelming evidence — including surveillance video, a defense lawyer’s notes and testimony from close associates — establishing Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“This case should be over already,” said Jeffrey Swartz, a professor at Cooley Law School and former judge in Florida. “There was nothing in this case that complex.”

That’s what distinguishes the classified documents case from the other — more legally intricate — criminal cases against Trump, which revolve around everything from allegations of hush money paid to a porn actress to complex racketeering charges and his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

But defense lawyers see it differently, and Cannon — a former federal prosecutor who was appointed to the bench in 2020 and has limited trial experience as a judge — has proved receptive to some of their arguments since even before the case was filed last June.

The judge first made headlines weeks after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago when, responding to a Trump lawsuit seeking to recover the seized documents from the federal government, she appointed an independent arbiter to sift through all the records. That appointment was overturned by a unanimous federal appeals panel, which said Cannon had overstepped her bounds.

“My sense of it is, when she did get reversed by the 11th Circuit that made her gun-shy, so she’s gone at a very slow pace” and issued “very few public, written decisions about important issues,” said John Fishwick, Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Soon after Trump was charged, Cannon set the case for trial on May 20, 2024. But last fall she signaled she would reconsider that date during a March 1 hearing. The hearing took place as scheduled — but no replacement date was picked, even though both sides operating on the assumption that the May 20 date is moot have suggested the trial could begin this summer.

That’s not the only unresolved question. Defense lawyers have filed about a half-dozen motions to dismiss the case, including on grounds that the prosecution is vindictive and that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was illegal.

Cannon this month heard hours of arguments on two of the dismissal motions — whether Trump was entitled under a statute known as the Presidential Records Act to retain the classified documents after he left office and whether the Espionage Act law at the heart of the case was so vague as to be unconstitutional.

Cannon appeared skeptical of the defense assertions and, after the hearing, issued a terse two-page order rejecting the vagueness argument while permitting Trump to raise it again later.

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She has not yet acted on the Presidential Records Act motion, but legal experts noted her direction last week to lawyers for both sides to weigh in on proposed jury instructions that appeared to tilt in Trump’s favor. She asked them to respond to a premise that said in part: “A president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision.”

That wording was notable because it echoes arguments Trump’s lawyers have been making for months. They insist that law allowed him to designate the records he was charged with retaining as his own personal files. Smith’s team, by contrast, says the law has no relevance in a case concerning illegal possession of top-secret information, including nuclear secrets.

“It seems a little early in the game to be talking about jury instructions when there are substantial questions of law that have been raised that need to be resolved,” said Aaron, though he said the jury instructions order could be a way to tee up those resolved questions.

Besides the pending motions to dismiss, Cannon has yet to rule on a defense motion seeking to compel prosecutors to turn over a raft of information they insist would show that President Joe Biden’s administration had “weaponized” the criminal justice system in bringing the Trump case.

That assertion is in keeping with campaign-trail claims by Trump and his allies that he’s a victim of political persecution by the Biden Justice Department. He’s complained that he was charged when Biden, who was also investigated for retaining classified information, was not — prompting Smith’s team to lay out the abundant differences in the investigations.

An even more contentious dispute centers around a defense request to file on the public docket a motion that would identify potential prosecution witnesses. Cannon initially consented to the filing but paused her order after prosecutors argued that such a disclosure could jeopardize the safety of the witnesses.

“It may be that the judge is just afraid of making a mistake, but delaying it just puts it off,” said Kevin McMunigal, a Case Western Reserve University law professor. “Eventually she’s going to have to make a decision about these.”