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On Friday night Francisco Liriano bounced back with a pretty good start against Seattle. He held them to 1 run through 6 innings. He still threw a lot of pitches and walked 4 batters, but he managed to avoid the disastrous innings that had plagued him recently.

The game headed into extra innings and after the Mariners accurately predicted Ron Gardenhire's squeeze attempt and pitched out trapping Joe Mauer between 3rd and home, Matt Tolbert managed to hit a fly ball to deep left field. The ball was misplayed by Wladimir Balentien for an error and it allowed the Twins to win 2-1.

The Twins will host the Seattle Mariners tonight for the final season opener at the Metrodome in front of a sold out crowd. The Twins enter the season as the picks by many to win the AL Central, largely because division is relatively weak again this year.

The Twins have just a handful of players to cut prior to heading north for the start of the season (one week from tomorrow), so there's a pretty clear picture of what the roster will look like when the Twins host Seattle on April 6th.

The currrent roster is as follows:

Pitchers

The season has technically started, but I think it's still early enough to fairly submit my predictions. Feel free to add yours to the comments.

Carlos Silva is close to signing with the Seattle Mariners, reports Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports.com. The deal would be worth $44 million for 4 years. That's a lot of money for a league-average pitcher, but it doesn't come as much of a surprise.

Seattle held a narrow 1-run lead against Johan Santana and the Twins for most of this game, but the Twins were able to put together a big inning in the seventh and hold off a ninth inning charge from the Mariners to win the game and sweep the 3 game series. The Mariners scored first when Ichiro reached on a Jason Bartlett throwing error. Ichiro was thrown caught in a run-down later in the inning between third and home, but it allowed Jose Vidro to move to second and be driven in by a Raul Ibanez single.

In week 10 the Twins lost a series in Seattle and won a home series against Baltimore for a record of 3-3. After a week of no offense, the Twins bats began to show some life by scoring a total of 36 runs through the 6 games. The offense was led by two grand slams from Michael Cuddyer, 3 homers from Justin Morneau and of course the hitting tear that Joe Mauer has been on the past month.

I started writing this entry at about quarter to midnight Wednesday night. It was the top of the 8th and the Twins were down 9-4. I assumed the game was lost (I know—bad Twins fan) and I was going to start writing about everything that went wrong in the game.

The Twins won in dramatic fashion on a Lew Ford walk-off homer in the 10th to complete the sweep of Seattle. Johan Santana pitched 7 innings and gave up 3 runs. He did not figure into the decision and Joe Nathan picked up the win after pitching the top of the 10th.

After losing 4 straight the Twins now have a winning streak started after beating Seattle on Tuesday night and Kansas City on Wednesday night. The Twins have also finally found a cure for Brad Radke's early inning struggles -- the Kansas City Royals. Radke gave up just 3 hits, no walks and no runs through the first 6 innings of the game. He did finally surrender a solo homerun to Matt Stairs in the 7th (it's not a true Radke start without a homerun allowed). By that time the Twins already had a comfortable 6 run lead. Fransisco Liriano came in to finish the came and after being a little roughed up in his last outing, he was back to his old ways Wednesday night, striking out 3 and allowing just 1 hit in 2 innings.