Local baseball team gets renamed in honor of a Minnesota Twins' player. Just not who you think.

It is really wonderful to see professional baseball players to be good corporate citizens and invest in their communities, appreciating what they did for them in their earlier steps on the way to becoming stars.

From the Twins' world, local Minnesotans, Joe Mauer and Glen Perkins have donated a lot of their money and time to several local causes.  But they never had a team named after them.  A third Twins' lefty just did.

LHP Brian Duensing, a graduate of Millard South at Omaha, Nebraska (the place where he met his wife as well), has donated a large sum of money to his local High School Legion team to be used for uniforms and baseball-related expenses.   In return, the team will be named the 52s (his uniform number) in his honor.

Always good to see the players of your favorite team do the right thing.  Congratulations to Brian Duensing!

Following the Twins' international free agent signings

Today is the first day of the international free agent signing period. I will be following the Twins activity as well as the movement around Miguel Angel Sano and post updates on my Twitter. At the end of the day I will summarize any signings. You can follow the Twitter updates either here (on the panel directly to the left of this post) or at Twitter. I will be an interesting day. Here is Baseball America's top 25 potential international free agents list, ranked by bonus size.

Update: 8:45 PM EDT. Still no definite news on Sano. La Velle Neal III indicated that the Twins made an offer to Sano (contingent on whether he is 16) at "around $3 million) but ESPN's Jorge Arangure had not heard of an offer as of an hour and a half ago. La Velle got his information from the Twins' organization, while Jorge from the receiving end in the Dominican Republic, so it is not conflicted: An offer could be made but Sano or his agent might not want to publicize it until all is said and done. I do not think that this will be resolved today, but I will be updated on Twitter (and here) as information moves along. Will an offer "around $3 million" be good enough? Maybe. If you look at the Baseball America's predicted top bonuses, where Sano is listed as number one, you will see that the number 2 player, Wagner Mateo, was signed by the Cardinals for $3.1 million and the number 3 player, Gary Sanchez, was signed by the Yankees for $3 million, an offer larger than $3.1 million might make it happen

On other news, the Twins have replaced Sean Henn with Brian Duensing in their pen and Louis Ayala signed a contract with the Florida Marlins after we was released by the Twins who could not find a buyer earlier today.

Update: 10:05 EDT: Just got confirmation that the Twins will sign SS Jorge Polanco (2 sources confirm, but this is the latest -ESPN's Jorge Arangure- setting the bonus to $700K; earlier, Baseball America's Ben Badler indicated that the Twins "will sign Polanco") He will turn 16 this Sunday, so no deal can be announced until then.

The pitching battle is over... for now

Scott Baker was placed in the 15 day DL, retroactive to March 27, which means that Brian Duensing, Phillip Humber and R.A. Dickey will all make the trip North. The starters will slide a day ahead with Liriano starting the opener against Seattle next Monday. It is reported that R.A. Dickey might be the 5th starter, starting at April 10th in Chicago. Baker will probably come off the DL on April 12, which means that the battle for that last spot will continue for a week or so in the bigs in meaningful games.

I will be doing profiles on Phillip Humber and Brian Duensing soon.

About the last 2 bench positions, for which there is a battle between Brandon Harris (he is close to a "lock" because he is out of options), Matt Tolbert and Brian Buscher, there are a couple of interesting developments today;

• It has been reported that Cardinal Scouts were in the stands in Twins' games, and Troy Glaus' rehab after his shoulder surgery took a turn for the worse


• Today, Mike Cuddyer started at 1B (Morneau was scratched with back tightness) instead of Brian Buscher

Could it be that Buscher will be a Cardinal in the near future settling that battle?