Twins' arm race unlikely over

Four thoughts from the weekend in sports, as we work on transitioning from winter to spring:

• The preface to this is that I don't know as much about baseball as Paul Molitor and other Twins decisionmakers, so I'm working on giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the handling of the big-league club's pitching staff. But it's hard not to come back to this:

If the Twins were really trying to win this year, they would have kept hard-throwing righty Alex Meyer and put him in the bullpen instead of sending him to Class AAA Rochester. The bullpen has a lot of holes, and a few Meyer strikeouts could have helped.

If the Twins were really trying to see what they had in Meyer and Trevor May — acquired in separate offseason trades after the 2012 season for Denard Span and Ben Revere — they would have one or both of them in the rotation.

Instead, they seem stuck in the worst of all worlds. Meyer and May, both 25, are in the minors, and if they stay there much longer we won't be able to call them prospects any more. Mike Pelfrey, a failed starter here, was upset about being sent to the bullpen and doesn't figure to help much there. Tommy Milone, who has a decent track record but also has a 4.80 career ERA pitching anywhere but Oakland's spacious ballpark, is the No. 5 starter.

Maybe this worrying is for nothing. If the Twins only use five starting pitchers this year, it will be a great thing; if they need more, as they almost always do, they have more. That's probably the team's thinking at the outset, but it seems pretty safe for an organization with nothing to lose.

• It's hard to say a Final Four with three No. 1 seeds and a No. 7 seed is predictable, but on Selection Sunday if someone would have guaranteed Kentucky, Duke, Wisconsin and Michigan State were going to make it, few could have argued the logic. The first three have been the best teams in college basketball for the course of the season. And Michigan State? Never bet against Tom Izzo in March.

• The Gophers men's hockey team won 11 of 14 games down the stretch of an up-and-down season and appeared to have momentum going into the NCAA tournament. Coach Don Lucia, though, said scrambling to win all those games might have made Minnesota "emotionally flat" in the tourney — a strange thing to conceive of given it was a group of veteran skaters who came back for the chance to win an NCAA title and faced an in-state rival in the round of 16.

• OK, let's end on a positive note. The Vikings have brought in Babatunde Aiyegbusi, a 6-9, 351-pound Polish offensive lineman. If that combination of name, size, background and position doesn't put him in an immediate position to be a fan favorite, I don't know what does.

Michael Rand