We don’t want to read too much into Francisco Liriano’s start yesterday other than to say it was, well, a good start. As most people have said all along: he doesn’t need to be what he was in 2006; he just has to be close. And yesterday, he was close enough to throw six shutout innings and to, at least for the moment, give Twins fans a dizzyingly good feeling about the starting rotation not just for 2008 but well beyond. Five guys — Scott Baker, Nick Blackburn, Kevin Slowey, Glen Perkins and Liriano — all between the ages of 24 and 26 make up a rotation for a team that is now in first place with two months to play. Examples of such depth of youth on a successful starting staff are very rare; we think immediately of the 2003 Marlins and some of the early 1990s teams (minus Charlie Leibrandt) in Atlanta. Not one of the Twins’ starters has pitched a full Major League season; Baker (65), Blackburn (22), Slowey (28), Liriano (24) and Perkins (16) have combined to make 155 career starts — more than 200 fewer than the recently dispatched Livan Hernandez has made all by himself. Now: obviously there are no guarantees that these five pitchers will continue on the arcs established this year. Injuries and sudden bouts of ineffectiveness can crop up at any point for a pitcher (just ask Carl Pavano, Dontrelle Willis and, to a lesser degree, Brad Penny from that Marlins team of just five years ago). But in light of these Twins’ Young Guns’ accomplishments, we have two questions:

1) How confident are you that they can keep up their solid work and pitch the Twins into the playoffs this year?

2) How much better do you feel about the future of the staff than you did at the start of the year, when Johan Santana, Carlos Silva and Matt Garza were gone and replaced with, frankly, no sure things?

*Fasola-link! RIP, Skip Caray. Indeed. On a personal note, we grew up listening to the dulcet, nasal tones of Mr. Caray. He will be missed.

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