SID's JOTTINGS

• This season, to buy a Vikings single-game ticket to the Packers game, you also have to buy a ticket to the Falcons game as well. To buy a single ticket to the Patriots game, you have to purchase a ticket to the Jets game. After going with 64,000 seats at the Metrodome for years, the Vikings will have only 52,000-plus seats at TCF Bank Stadium, with 1,700 bleacher seats being added in the open end of the stadium.

• Mike Grant's Eden Prairie High School football team will play host to Winnipeg's Oak Park Academy on Aug. 30. Eden Prairie, finding it hard to schedule opponents, played at Winnipeg in 2010, including a 33-0 victory over Oak Park.

• If $8 million is raised to remodel Mariucci Arena, the surface at the Gophers men's hockey arena will be dropped 16 inches, and the rink will become 200x93 feet, down from 200x100, to increase the capacity of the arena by 200 seats to 10,200. Other improvements will come in the locker room and in the M Club room.

• Twins General Manager Terry Ryan signed All-Star Kurt Suzuki to a two-year, $12 million deal with a third-year option. Ryan said recently that he can envision a future catching platoon of Suzuki and Josmil Pinto, which had been the plan for this year. "We have Pinto down at Triple-A, who we anticipate being an everyday guy at some point, he's still a little raw when it comes to calling games and handling the staff, but we do like his bat," Ryan said. "He has a chance to be an everyday catcher. But it wouldn't hurt any to have a Suzuki-Pinto combination, either."

• John Anderson and the Gophers baseball team got a nice commitment in Waconia pitcher Jake Stevenson, a 6-4 righthander with a fastball that reaches close to 90 miles per hour.