You can never have too much starting pitching. If it becomes a bona fide surplus, and there just aren't enough spots for guys who deserve them, a major league team can always make a trade — and usually a very good trade — sending out a pitcher and bringing back something else useful.

You can certainly, though, not have enough starting pitching. The Twins know this because they learned it the most memorable way: the hard way. The 2011-14 Twins have been the Hard Knocks School of Starting Pitching , never finishing better than 26th in MLB in ERA despite attempts, to various degrees, to fix the problem.

What they've apparently discovered along the way — a good thing — is that hoping and wishing are not the same as planning. What they've also discovered is that best-case scenarios, or even modest-case scenarios, don't always pan out. So even if you have five starting pitchers you think might form a decent rotation given a break here or there, it's probably not going to work. Injuries happen. Ineffectiveness happens. Exceeding expectations occasionally happens, but not enough to offset the overall failure of the whole (see: Phil Hughes, 2014).

The Twins in these past four years have usually had pitchers available to start games. In 2012, 12 different pitchers started at least five games. What they've lacked is quality options. They usually ended up with a couple decent starters, if they were lucky. And in this era of baseball, when elbows get wonky and scouting reports catch up fast, you need more than five.

The Twins don't yet have five. What they do have is more than $150 million invested in three — including what amounts to a three-year, $42 million extension for Hughes that was announced Monday — that will take all of them through at least 2017 (Nolasco, with an option after that), with Ervin Santana (2018) and Hughes (2019) even longer-terms. There are no guarantees with any of those three, particularly Nolasco after last season, but they are investments that indicate real effort to fix a problem.

Throw Kyle Gibson into that mix — 13 wins, ERA of 4.47, FIP of 3.80 last season — and there's at least more than just wishful thinking for a fourth spot.

After that, you get into the whole cast of "maybes." Guys like Mike Pelfrey, Tommy Milone have had decent MLB seasons in the past. Trevor May and Alex Meyer could be ready to challenge for a spot. J.O. Berrios and Kohl Stewart have potential further down in the minors.

Here's the thing: In some years past, Pelfrey, Milone and those others would have been THE plan. They wouldn't have been the competition at the bottom of the rotation. They would have been the competition at the top (see: 2012, with the likes of Pelfrey, Kevin Correia, Vance Worley, Scott Diamond and Liam Hendriks as the top options).

So if you find yourself wondering how the Twins are going to integrate some of their young pitchers or holdover arms into their rotation … don't worry. They don't have pitching depth — yet. If they do get starting pitching depth, it will be a nice problem to have and an easy problem to solve.