Which do you prefer as a sports fan, baseball or motorsports?

There is abundant room for both, as Memorial Day weekend so eminently proved. In fact, between Sunday’s day of auto racing all around the world and the weekend’s three Minnesota Twins games, there were enough plot-twists and sensational action to make a sports fan out of anyone.

Let’s jump back and forth, chronologically. First, on Saturday, we weren’t in Bradenton, Fla., where the REAL achievement was -- UMD junior Emilee Trost hit the track in the Division II NCAA meet and ran away with the 1,500-meter run -- the metric mile. Trost clocked 4 minutes, 12.64 seconds (4:12.64) to set a school record with the enormous national championship.

Meanwhile, down at Target Field, Brian Dozier hit an opposite-field 2-run home run in the eighth inning to break a 2-2 tie, and Joe Mauer followed with a double and Byron Buxton singled him home for a 5-2 lead that held for a 5-3 victory over Tampa Bay.

On Sunday, Miguel Sano sat out to rest his ego, which suffered through right consecutive strikeouts, soon to become nine. The Twins again got up 5-3 on Tampa Bay, then blew the lead in the top of the ninth. At 5-5, the teams battled into the 14th inning when Tampa scored, but the Twins countered, and it was 6-6 going into the 15th.

The Twins, out of bullpen pitchers, sent starter Hector Santiago out to try to get through one inning. He couldn’t, allowing back to back home runs to Evan Longoria and Logan Morrison, and the Twins fell 8-6 in the longest game they’ve ever had -- 15 innings, and 6 hours, 26 minutes. The bright spot for the Twins was that Joe Mauer, continuing to ride a surge in hitting, went 4-for-5 with two singles, a double and a home run, but all for naught.

That sent the Twins to the official Memorial Day celebration game against the Houston Astros. Those fans who spent a week at Target Field on Sunday might have thought things couldn’t get more bizarre. They were wrong.

The Twins had superstar pitcher Ervin Santana hurling, and he stopped the powerful Astros through seven innings. The Twins erupted for seven runs in the fifth inning, the 7-run rally capped by Mauer singling home a run and then Sano finding his stroke again for a 2-run homer.

If you’re Santana, you had to feel pretty secure when Robbie Grossman homered in the seventh for an 8-2 lead. But the Twins bullpen was spent, and in the eighth inning, Houston scored 11 runs and blistered the Twins 16-8.

Like it or not, there were a lot of runs scored, a lot of swaps of momentum, and plenty of action, even thought the Twins lost two of those three.

Meanwhile, back on Sunday, early risers could watch Sebastien Vettel win the Monaco Grand Prix, claiming the Formula 1 race through the streets of Monaco just ahead of Ferrari teammate Kimi Raikkonen, by the margin of a later tire-change stop. Raikkonen, who won the pole, led Vettel until making an early change for tires. Perhaps trying to match rival Mercedes in pit strategy, the Ferrari team kept Vettel on the track, and he proceeded to crank off the three fastest race laps running alone.

By the time he pitted, Vettel was able to dart in and out with new tires and get just back ahead of his teammate, who expressed displeasure thinking he was out-strategized by his own team. Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes ace who is second to Vettel in points, finished seventh and was never a factor in the race, as the series heads for Montreal in another week.

About the time that race ended, NBC switched to the Indianapolis 500, the 101st running of the classic. It was one of the more stirring Indy races, with 15 leaders and 35 lead changes, which meant that any of over a dozen drivers could win the race.

Pole sitter Scott Dixon escaped serious injury when he crashed into Jay Howard, whose car had bumped the outer wall between Turns 1 and 2 and he veered right into Dixon’s path, vaulting him on about a 300-foot flight with an upside down crash landing onto the top of the concrete inside guard rail. Dixon’s Chip Ganassi car broke in two, and he rolled over completely before coming to rest. Amazingly, Dixon climbed out and walked to the ambulance.

As the lead changed hands repeatedly, three-time winner Helio Castroneves charged up from mid-pack and it looked like he had the best chance to win as he closed in on Takuma Sato. The two sailed down the straightaway, and with 5 laps of the scheduled 200 remaining, Castroneves drafted and passed Sato for the lead. But two laps later, Sato came down the inside and regained the lead.

Castroneves made one last bid, but time was running out, and when a driver attempts a pass at 220 mph and can’t quite pull it off, he falls back and has to move back up to position himself for another pass. Castroneves got close, but never close enough, and Sato, driving a Honda-powered car for Michael Andretti, became the first Japanese driver to ever win the Indy 500.

In case you needed more, there was the late-afternoon Coca Cola 600 at Charlotte, and that race, too, had its twists and turns. A rain delay of more than an hour and a half fouled up a lot of strategies, and when most of the drivers came in for a final pit stop for fuel and tires, Jimmie Johnson and Austin Dillon, a novice driver who is the grandson of NASCAR icon Richard Childress, were among the few who stayed out and kept driving.

Dillon was informed that he would run out of fuel with five laps to go, but he persevered on the gamble, running a strong second to Johnson through the last few laps. But it was Johnson who ran out of gas two laps from the finish, and Dillon charged by him to hold off Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. and win his first NASCAR Cup victory.

You can’t have much more drama than that, unless maybe it was at Indy. Or at Monaco.

Whatever, if you had never seen a baseball game or a major auto race, you could have spent a little time in front of a TV set and come away a huge fan of both sports.