I'll check in with some thoughts on newbie Chris Barnwell and the bizarre 5th starter platoon tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll send you to other places to see what I've written about other things.
I've got a new Prospectus Notebook up on the travails of the Brewers bullpen:
The biggest problem with Milwaukee's bullpen is unrelated to the four or five central figures. It's the rotating corps of Triple-A middle relievers who have no business wearing Brewer uniforms in the first place. A couple of weeks into the season, Ned Yost switched to a 13-man pitching staff, defensible at the time as there were a couple of non-DL'd nagging injuries, and Bill Hall gave the bench sufficient flexibility to go one man short. But while the initial reasons have disappeared, the 13-man staff has stayed, and though the cast of characters has changed frequently, the level of performance has resembled nothing so much as Double-A equivalencies.
And I wrote a more general interest story, called "Arms to the Rescue", about several teams (the Brewers among them) who may soon get an infusion of talent when a solid starter comes back from injury. In addition to Ben Sheets, I talk about A.J. Burnett, Rich Harden, Randy Wolf, Adam Eaton, Mark Prior, and (even though he doesn't exactly fit) Roger Clemens.