Jhoan Duran came to the Minnesota Twins as a 20-year old prospect from the Arizona Diamondbacks as part of a package for infielder Eduardo Escobar at the 2018 trade deadline.

Seven years later, Duran is again on the move at the trade deadline, as the Twins are selling off again, though this time he is the headliner in the deal.

The Twins are trading their hard-throwing closer in the midst of what is potentially the best season of his career on Wednesday evening to the Philadelphia Phillies, a source confirmed. In return, they are landing catching prospect Eduardo Tait and right-handed pitcher Mick Abel.

When Duran, 27, acknowledged the possibility of a trade just about an hour before news broke, he expressed sadness over the idea of leaving the Twins organization.

“That’d be hard,” Duran said of a potential trade just hours before he was sent to Philadelphia. “I got a couple years here, and I feel like here is my family. So if that happens, that’s maybe breaking my heart a little bit.”

The reliever was considered the best available on the trade market, particularly after Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase was placed on non-disciplinary paid leave earlier this week as Major League Baseball investigates whether he violated its gambling policy.

Duran, who has a 2.01 earned-run average and 53 strikeouts across 49 1/3 innings this season, debuted in 2022 and has been among the best relievers in the game since. He has become a fan favorite at Target Field over the past four seasons for good reason.

The Twins’ asking price for Duran, who still has two years of team control remaining after 2025, was said to be two top-100 prospects. They appear to have gotten that with both Tait (No. 56) and Abel (No. 92) included on MLB Pipeline’s list.

Tait, an 18-year-old catcher, is currently hitting .255 with a .753 OPS and 11 home runs across Class-A and Class-A Advanced this season. Abel, 23, was the Phillies’ first-round selection in the 2020 draft and debuted this season. He has started six games as a major leaguer this year and has a 5.04 earned-run average. He has performed well at Triple-A, with a 2.31 ERA and 81 strikeouts across 74 innings.

The move is the second in what is expected for the Twins to be a busy deadline — all trades must be completed by 5 p.m. CDT on Thursday. The Twins, who are 51-57 and have lost all four series they’ve played since the all-star break, traded starting pitcher Chris Paddack to Detroit on Monday.

Paddack, along with five others — Willi Castro, Harrison Bader, Danny Coulombe, Ty France and Christian Vázquez — are free agents at season’s end, making them the most likely to be moved.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Former NBA star Gilbert Arenas was arrested Wednesday along with five other people, including a suspected member of an Israeli organized crime group, on suspicion of hosting illegal high-stakes poker games at a Los Angeles mansion owned by Arenas, federal prosecutors said.

All six defendants are charged with one count of conspiracy to operate an illegal gambling business and one count of operating an illegal gambling business, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They are all scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday afternoon.

Messages seeking comment were sent to an attorney and PR firm that represented Arenas. Online court records don’t identify an attorney for him.

Arenas, 43, is also charged with making false statements to federal investigators, the statement said. He is named in the indictment as ”Agent Zero,” a nickname from his playing days with the Washington Wizards.

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The other five defendants are residents of Los Angeles ranging in age from 27 to 52. Among them is a 49-year-old man described by prosecutors as “a suspected organized crime figure from Israel.”

The indictment says that from September 2021 to July 2022, the defendants staged the home in the Encino neighborhood to host “Pot Limit Omaha” poker games and other illegal gambling activity. The poker players paid a “rake,” a fee charged as a percentage or fixed amount from each hand gambled, court documents claim.

One of the defendants hired young women who, in exchange for tips, served drinks and provided massages and “offered companionship” to the poker players, according to prosecutors.

“The women were charged a ‘tax’ – a percentage of their earnings from working the games. Chefs, valets, and armed security guards also were hired to staff these illegal poker games,” the statement said.

The Israeli man faces separate charges including marriage fraud and lying on immigration documents. He is suspected of conspiring with a 35-year-old Los Angeles woman to enter into a sham marriage for the purposes of obtaining permanent legal status in the U.S.

If convicted, the defendants would face a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison for each count, prosecutors said.

Arenas averaged 20.7 points during an 11-year career with four teams, most notably a seven-plus season stint in Washington from 2004-11.

Charismatic and mercurial, Arenas — who counted “Agent Zero” (representing his number) and “Hibachi” for the way he could heat up during a game among his many nicknames — was a three-time All-Star, a gifted scorer and one of the key cogs in a handful of Wizards teams that enjoyed modest success in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Yet Arenas’ run in Washington ended in disgrace. Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton were suspended for the balance of the NBA season in January 2010 following a locker-room incident in which both players pulled guns on each other.

Arenas returned to play briefly for Washington the following season before being traded to Orlando. He then bounced to Memphis in 2011, coming off the bench for 17 games before stepping away to play in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2012-13. He never returned to the NBA.

His son, Alijah Arenas, was a Los Angeles high school basketball star who is a highly touted freshman player for the University of Southern California. His college career is on hold pending knee surgery and rehab is expected to take months, the school said last week.

It was almost lights out for the Washington County Fair this year.

The fairgrounds, located in Baytown Township, lost power at 11:17 p.m. during severe weather on Monday night. With the fair set to open at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning, crews scrambled to come up with a plan, said Fair Manager Doris Ostertag.

“What’s the level above stressed? That’s what I was,” she said.

Fair officials brought in generators to run lights and operate a well so the fairgrounds would have water, she said.

“That’s all we were doing yesterday, running around,” she said. “We lost our setup time.”

Fortunately, crews from Xcel Energy, which had originally predicted power could be out until 5:15 p.m. Thursday, were able to restore electric service around 11:45 p.m. Tuesday, just 7 hours and 15 minutes before the gates opened.

“We all wrote it down in our books (for 2025) because we’ve never had that happen before,” Ostertag said.

Back-to-back storms earlier this week brought lightning, heavy rain, hail and winds up to 65 mph to the area, damaging electric infrastructure and causing outages for about 300,000 customers across Minnesota, primarily in the Twin Cities metro and western Wisconsin, according to Xcel officials.

Crews on Wednesday were working to restore power to the remaining 3,000 customers, primarily in the east metro, and hoped to have them back online by Wednesday night.

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By MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans are considering changing Senate rules to speed up confirmation of President Donald Trump’s executive branch nominees.

The move forces a possible clash with Democrats in the coming days as Trump pressures them to fill dozens of administration posts before they are scheduled to leave town for the monthlong August recess.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has already more than doubled the number of executive branch and judicial confirmations from Trump’s first term by holding the Senate in session for more days and longer hours. Still, Trump says he wants more, and Democrats are delaying a vote on most every nominee, arguing that Trump’s picks are extreme.

“We may need to look at doing things differently on nominees generally if the Democrats continue on this path of obstruction that they’re on right now,” Thune said Wednesday morning, adding that the number of willing votes to change Senate rules “is growing quickly on our side right now.”

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The standoff between the two parties, with Trump encouraging Republicans to move even more swiftly or cancel their August recess, is likely to come to a head in the next week. Democrats have little desire to give in to Thune’s demand to confirm a tranche of nominees before they leave, even as senators in both parties are eager to skip town after several long months of work and bitter partisan fights over legislation.

The Senate clash over nominees is not new, though it has intensified over the last two decades as both parties have increasingly used stalling tactics to delay confirmations that were once quick, bipartisan and routine. In 2013, Democrats changed Senate rules for lower court judicial nominees to remove the 60-vote threshold for confirmations as Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s judicial nominations. In 2017, Republicans did the same for Supreme Court nominees as Democrats tried to block Trump’s nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Still, Democrats have blocked more nominees than usual this year, denying any quick unanimous consent votes and forcing roll calls on each one, a lengthy process that takes several days per nominee and allows for debate time. It’s the first time in recent history that the minority party hasn’t allowed at least some quick confirmations.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats have blocked quick votes because “historically bad nominees deserved historic levels of scrutiny.”

But Thune said the rules are being “misused” by Democrats, and there is a lot of interest in the GOP conference in potentially speeding up the process. A rules change, in the end, “could benefit both parties when they have the presidency.”

It’s unclear how Republicans would change the rules, but they could potentially cut the number of procedural votes, reduce or eliminate the standard two hours of debate time or somehow force nominations to be bundled together, among other possible options. A rules change would require a simple majority vote, so almost all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans would have to be on board.

North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven said that in discussions among GOP senators, “all options are on the table.”

“We’d rather not have to,” Hoeven said. “If they would follow the same approach we gave them as recently as Biden, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Democrats have discussed similar changes in the past when Republicans were blocking their own nominees, but they would be unlikely to support any move to change the rules. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said that if Republicans propose to eliminate any debate time, they would be “resisting scrutiny” for a president’s nominations.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., has said in the past that he would be open to changing Senate rules to reduce the number of Senate-confirmed positions in government. But he said he would not be open to reducing debate time for nominees.

“There can be non-controversial nominees where you don’t need two hours, but there are some super important ones where that’s not enough time,” Kaine said.

The GOP leader is facing his own pressure from Trump, who has publicly called on Republicans to cancel the August recess to confirm more nominees. Trump also criticized Senate Republicans on social media this week for continuing with the so-called “blue slip” process that allows home state senators to approve or block some judicial nominees.

In a Tuesday post on Truth Social, Trump called on Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to have the “courage” to stop honoring the blue slip forms that are submitted to the home state senators, regardless of party. Trump said as a result of this “custom” only Democrats or “a weak and ineffective Republican” can get nominated.

“Chuck Grassley, who I got re-elected to the U.S. Senate when he was down, by a lot, in the Great State of Iowa, could solve the ‘Blue Slip’ problem,” Trump posted.

Opening a committee hearing on Thursday, Grassley defended the practice and added that he was “offended by what the president said, and I’m disappointed that it would result in personal insults.”

Thune also backed the process Wednesday, noting that he used the blue slip process himself during former President Joe Biden’s administration when there was a judicial vacancy in South Dakota. “I don’t sense any rush to change it,” Thune said.