If you frequent Brewers message boards such as the one on this site and others or turn on a sports talk radio show this spring training, you are likely to run across someone opining that the Brewers should just "dump" some combination of Dave Bush, Chris Capuano and Claudio Vargas. The logic behind such sentiments likely has just as much with those people wanting to see the young trio of starters (Yovanni Gallardo, Manny Parra and Carlos Villanueva) given spots over the other three, though I suspect some would literally just like to see them gone, never to return.

The problem, of course, is that injuries are commonplace among pitchers. Any Brewer fan following Ben Sheets' career over the last few years should be intimately aware of this issue. A quick survey of last years NL teams showed that, on average, teams had to get 31.6 starts from starters other than their top 5 (by number of starts made). Now, that number of course doesn't just reflect injury, but also  call ups who became available mid-year and guys who washed out of the rotation and needed to be replaced. But still, when you consider Sheets proclivity for injury and the fact that Gallardo, Villanueva and Parra have a combined 31 major league starts, the chances are good that the team is going to need to get starts from someone outside of that group.

What the Brewers have going for them is that they have 8 guys capable of posting ERA's around 5 and lower. Caludio Vargas posted a 5.09 ERA and even in "bad seasons," Bush was at 5.12 and Capuano checked in at 5.10.  According to this from 2003-2007 the average 4th spot in an NL rotation yielded a 4.95 ERA and the average 5th spot got shelled to the tune of a 6.98 ERA, any one of those pitchers is going to keep the back spots of the rotation from slipping down below average.

There is probably room to trade one of the three, should an suitable offer come along. But even if the Brewers do decide to go with a rotation including the three youngsters once Gallardo is healed, chances are good they'll need one of these guys for a while and another at least at some point in the season.