Has anyone else noticed there’s something going on with the Twins?

Remember when the management tanked the season by trading 40 percent of the active roster at the trade deadline? It was the last week in July. The team bottomed out and on Monday, a day after the team finished the season with 92 losses, the Twins fired manager Rocco Baldelli.

It wasn’t totally crazy, or even unexpected. The Twins missed the playoffs in four of the past five seasons, and it didn’t look great when veteran all-star Pablo Lopez, in the wake of the trade deadline, said that he and the remaining veterans would use the opportunity to “rebuild the culture in the clubhouse.”

“Culture,” he added, “is one thing we’ve been lacking the last couple of years.”

Lopez was talking primarily about teammates, presumably recently departed teammates, but it also didn’t look great for Baldelli, whose job it is to keep everyone working and engaged.

Still, the team that finished the season with a 10-inning, 2-1 loss at postseason-bound Philadelphia was a bad one, gutted by a weeklong series of trade deadline moves that swapped nearly all of the competent veterans for prospects. If anyone expected Baldelli to spin gold out of what was left, they were kidding themselves.

There were so many young players on the team in September — some making their first major league appearances after years in the minors — it could have been spring training. Except there would have been more veterans around.

Outside of Lopez, Byron Buxton, Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober and Ryan Jeffers, it’s going to look like that next season, as well. If no one else is traded this offseason.

Making this team better quickly will be impossible. Making it better, period, will be heavy lifting. With Baldelli and his staff ousted, the Twins are officially starting over from rock bottom. There is some talent in the system, some recently acquired, but right now the Twins have a weak-hitting lineup and a sketchy bullpen.

If the team that closed the 2025 season had started it, the Twins would have lost well over 100 games.

Cutting bait just two years removed from the team’s first playoff series victory since 2003 was a little bit odd. On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that ownership, disabused of the notion that it could sell the team for nearly $2 billion, wants to severely slash payroll.

And it has. That’s the easy part.

The hard part is building a good team and putting fans in the seats. Now team president Derek Falvey and general manager Jeremy Zoll, should they choose to accept the mission, are going to have to do that the way the Twins used to do it: development.

The new core was on the field over the last two months of the season, players such as Luke Keaschall, Austin Martin, Brooks Lee, Royce Lewis, Matt Wallner, Kody Funderburk, Zebby Matthews, David Festa and Simeon Woods Richardson. They will be joined by starter Mick Abel, the International League Pitcher of the Year this season.

There is talent there, but it’s unseasoned. Baldelli was tasked with getting the group to play more aggressively, to get on base and force the opposition to make plays. They responded to Baldelli, but wins were sparse. Is that still the plan?

More changes are coming.

With four young starters — Abel, Festa, Matthews and Woods Richardson — beginning their major league careers, it doesn’t make sense to hang on to Lopez, Ryan and Bailey Ober. Not when you’re starting over with players just getting a taste of the majors and an entirely new coaching staff.

If it works, it will be exciting and perhaps sustainable. Management thanks you for your patience.

Chief Baseball Officer Derek Falvey of the Minnesota Twins looks on as new manager Rocco Baldelli speaks as Baldelli is introduced at a press conference at Target Field on Oct. 25, 2018 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)
Rocco Baldelli #5 of the Minnesota Twins celebrates after defeating the Toronto Blue Jays in Game Two to win the Wild Card Series at Target Field on Oct. 04, 2023 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

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Rapper, singer and songwriter Doja Cat will return to Minneapolis’ Target Center on Oct. 4, 2026.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Oct. 10 through Ticketmaster. Fans who sign up at signup.ticketmaster.com/dojacat by 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, have access to a presale that starts at 10 a.m. Oct. 7.

The woman born Amala Dlamini adopted her stage name from her cat and her favorite strain of marijuana. After dropping out of high school, she taught herself to sing, rap and use GarageBand. Doja then spent the mid-’10s establishing herself as an extremely online star. After her 2018 major-label debut “Amala” largely flopped, Doja went ahead and recorded a novelty song “Mooo!” and released it via a homemade video that soon went viral.

The newfound attention all but forced Doja’s record label to take her seriously. Her 2019 single “Rules” broke through to a wider audience and was the first of a dozen of her songs — including “Say So” with her musical hero Nicki Minaj, “Streets,” “Kiss Me More” (with SZA), “Woman,” “Paint the Town Red” and “Angora” — to go multi-platinum.

Doja made her local arena debut in December 2023 in front of a near-capacity crowd at Target Center.

Last week, she released her fifth album, “Vie,” which sees her return to pop music after her hip hop-centric fourth record “Scarlet.” Earlier this month, Doja performed the single “Jealous Type” at the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards with help from legendary saxophonist Kenny G.

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By ED WHITE

DETROIT (AP) — The man who shot up a Michigan church and set a fire that killed four people was a former U.S. Marine who expressed animosity about the Mormon faith to a city council candidate knocking on doors just days before the attack.

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Thomas Sanford, who was known as Jake, drove a pickup truck with a deer skull and antlers strapped to the front and two large American flags flapping in the wind in the bed, according to friends and social media posts.

Sanford, 40, smashed that truck into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc Township. He was killed by police officers who rushed to the scene Sunday, 60 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Detroit. The building was destroyed.

Kris Johns, a council candidate in Burton, said he met Sanford while introducing himself to voters last week. He told MLive.com that Sanford was pleasant but became “unhinged” when he suddenly began talking about the Mormon church, as it is widely known.

It’s not known what ties, if any, Sanford had to the church. But Johns said Sanford indicated that some members wanted him to get rid of his tattoos. He also talked about “sealing,” the Mormon temple ceremony of joining a man, a woman and their children together for eternity.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” said the FBI was learning that Sanford “hated people of the Mormon faith.”

Genesee County prosecutor David Leyton said his office wrote warrants to search Sanford’s vehicles, home and electronic devices to try to discover his motives.

“All this takes time,” he told The Associated Press.

Coincidentally, Sanford and his family lived next to a church, Eastgate Baptist, in Burton. Pastor Jerome Taylor said he mostly talked to Sanford about fallen trees on church property that his neighbor wanted to cut and sell as firewood.

“He had free rein,” said Taylor, who described Sanford as a “general blue-collar person in our neighborhood.”

“The knowledge that there was a threat, a danger, across our property line so heinous — it’s a little bit mind-warping,” he said, adding that Sanford never attended Eastgate Baptist.

A family friend, Kara Pattison, said she saw Sanford on Friday, two days before the shooting. She and her daughter were walking in the street at the Goodrich High School homecoming parade and became startled when the driver of a pickup truck hit the gas pedal hard.

When the window was rolled down, it was Sanford “laughing,” Pattison said.

“How do you mourn the death of someone who did something so terrible?” Pattison told WDIV-TV, referring to the church attack.

After high school, Sanford served in the Marines from 2004 to 2008, including seven months in Iraq, focusing on vehicle operations and maintenance, records show. He was discharged at the rank of sergeant.

Under Michigan law, police, family or health professionals can ask a judge to take guns away from someone for reasons that include mental health. There were no petitions filed against Sanford, court administrator Barbara Menear said.

In 2015, Sanford’s baby son received groundbreaking treatment at a Fort Worth, Texas, hospital for a condition called “hyperinsulinism,” or abnormally high levels of insulin. The boy’s stay at Cook Children’s Health Care System lasted for weeks and was promoted by the hospital in a news release.

Sanford told the hospital that a doctor’s willingness to help his son was a “sign from heaven.”

“We put our faith to the wind and it took us to Texas,” he said.

Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump over his 2021 account suspension following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

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According to documents filed in federal court in California, $22 million of the settlement will be contributed to the Trust for the National Mall and the rest will go to other plaintiffs, including the American Conservative Union.

Google is the latest big tech company to settle lawsuits brought by Trump. In January, Meta Platforms agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook. Elon Musk’s X agreed to settle a similar lawsuit brought against the company then known as Twitter for $10 million.

The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.

The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled Oct. 6 court hearing to discuss the case with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.