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The Twins have been shuffling things around a bit the past few days as they deal with injuries and struggling players. Here's a rundown of what's happened.

On Friday the Twins activated Nick Punto from the DL and optioned Alexi Casilla to AAA to make room. It was the second time this season that Casilla has been demoted.

On Saturday the Twins optioned Anthony Swarzak to AAA right after his 7 shutout innings against the Cubs. The Twins recalled catcher Jose Morales to take his place. With several hitters on the DL and the fact that Joe Mauer is often being used as DH on his offdays, Ron Gardenhire wanted to have a 3rd catcher. The move brought the Twins' pitchers down to just 11. Morales has not played in either of the 2 games since being recalled.

Before the season starts I have to get my predictions set in stone, so people can point and laugh at me at the end of the season. Please share your picks in the comments.

American League

East: Tampa Bay Rays

Central: Cleveland Indians

West: Los Angeles Angels

Wild Card: New York Yankees

Cy Young: Roy Halladay

MVP: Grady Sizemore

ROY: David Price

The Twins completed their second consecutive sweep, again coming against a National league team at the Metrodome. On Sunday, they defeated one of the NL's best right-handed pitchers, Arizona's Brandon Webb. After a rough stretch, Livan Hernandez has now pitched two straight decent starts as he continued the trend of a rotation turnaround.

The Twins picked up Phil Nevin from the Chicago Cubs with just a few hours remaining in the waiver trading deadline. Will Nevin be a difference maker or will he just be another subpar option for the DH spot? Probably a little of both.

The Twins extended their season long win streak to 10 games with a Sunday victory over the Brewers. The win also completed the Twins third straight sweep. Francisco Liriano got off to a less than perfect start. He hit Rickie Weeks with a pitch and gave up a single to Jeff Cirillo. While pitching to Corey Hart, he caught a spike in the mound and tripped before delivering a pitch. The balk moved runners to second and third with no outs. Two strikeouts and a groundout got him out of the jam with no runs given up. Liriano was near perfect for the rest of the game—giving up just 3 hits and a walk through 8 shutout innings. Liriano also recorded a career high 12 strikeouts.

The Twins continued their winning ways by taking 5 of 6 games in interleague play last week. Impressively, they beat pitchers Roy Oswalt, Roger Clemens and Mark Prior. The Twins outscored their opponents 31-15 as their pitching was solid and they continued to get timely hitting. The only bad thing to say about week 12 was that the two teams in front of the Twins—the Tigers and White Sox—did just as well as the Twins.

The last time I saw a team play as poorly as the Cubs did on Sunday was in late May when I walked past a little league game. The Cubs made 3 official errors in the game, but also made a number of mistakes that weren't scored as errors. Balls found their way into holes as Cubs players simply looked at eachother in hopes that the other guy would make the play. The Cubs out-hit the Twins 11-10, but the lopsided 8-1 score showed just how awful the Cubs were. The positive is that the Twins took advantage of the mistakes—something all good teams do.

The Twins pulled off a Saturday night victory against the Cubs in the game I thought the cubs had the best chance of winning in this series. In front of a crowd of over 42,000, half of which was made up of Cub fans, Boof Bonser was able to pitch shutout ball for 6 1/3 innings. Reyes and Rincon also held the Cubs scoreless in relief and Joe Nathan picked up his 12th save with a scoreless ninth.

The Twins continue to roll right along as they took Friday night's series opener against the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs sent out unproven starter Carlos Marmol who didn't have good command of his pitches. He fell behind in the count often and the Twins took advantage of it by scoring 7 runs in Marmol's 5 2/3 innings. Michael Cuddyer and Justin Morneau provided plenty of run production from the middle of the lineup and Johan Santana was his usual self—limiting Chicago to just 1 earned run in 8 innings.

Roger Clemens was the talk of baseball coming into his Thursday night season debut against the Twins. However, once the game started Francisco Liriano became the true star of the game. Roger Clemens struggled with his pitch count—he left the game after 5 innings with 100 pitches. The Twins managed 2 runs in the second off Clemens, and that was all he gave up. In total, he allowed 6 hits and 2 walks in the five innings he pitched. While Clemens was pretty good for a first start of the season, Liriano was better.