BIRK TO BALTIMORE

A league source tells us that the Baltimore Ravens have agreed to terms with center Matt Birk. Birk, a St. Paul native, had spent eleven years with the Vikings, arriving more than a decade ago as a sixth-round draft pick from Harvard, the same year that receiver Randy Moss joined the team as a rookie. Birk was the last remaining link to the 1998 Vikings team, which won 15 regular-season games before losing the NFC title game to the Falcons. By all appearances, he gave the Vikings every opportunity to sign him, but as the days passed and no deal was reached he decided to visit Baltimore. Some thought it was a Kurt Warner-style leverage play, with Birk looking for an offer from Baltimore that he could shop back to the Vikings. (Birk apparently operates on a higher moral plane than that.) That said, the decision had to be a tough one for Birk, who recently told David Fleming of ESPN The Magazine that he was anxious about uprooting his four small children and moving them halfway across the country. And, as he told us three years ago, he wanted to stay in Minnesota: “I was born here, I’ll die here. I don’t want to leave.” But leave he did.