Friday Rockpile:

After debacles like yesterday play out, there's just not much left to say. Were the Rockies terrible? Sure. Any worse than they've been earlier this season? Not really. This team doesn't hit new lows anymore than it sort of scoots and bumps along the bottom like some long dead corpse as the tide brings it further out to sea. That the team doesn't know it's dead yet:

"It's tough to lose two games in one day - especially, going into the day, you feel like you can win both of them, gain some ground," Troy Tulowitzki said. "But we dug ourself a hole. Now we're going to have to get back out of it like we've been doing it all year. There is enough time. We're making it tough on ourself, very tough, but there's always time."

is probably some credit to them, but I'm suspecting any signs of life left this season are just the movements caused by crabs or other sea creatures feeding off 2008's cold, lifeless internal organs and not some sign that the Rockies are ready to once again rise from the deep.

The one solace would be that questions for 2009 are answered as we bump along. So far, while I'm more optimistic about the state of our position players than I was with the center field, catcher and second base issues looming for the start of 2008, the rotation still bugs me. The team, and us as fans, would really like to count on Jeff Francis to be a third stable force, but yesterday's start sent some mixed messages in that regard. For four innings he looked like vintage Francis, but for the last two, he looked like his 2008 version. Let's hope that those last two innings were just a glitch in the machine.

I won't be around until the end of tonight's game thread as I'm heading to Lexington for the Tourists game shortly, but Jake Peavy versus Glendon Rusch is just the sort of matchup that fosters my rotation queasiness for next season. While our hope is that Franklin Morales or Jason Hirsh or Greg Reynolds or any combination of the three with maybe even a Jorge De La Rosa thrown in will have learned and developed enough to give us at least some mild hope for down rotation match-ups next year, the fact is that as of right now there are still far too many maybe's and projections that haven't yet translated into their performance this season. Hoping that they will for next season is easy enough, but expecting them to is another matter. Failing that, it's pretty clear that the caliber of fallback starter we will wind up with will be closer to the Rusch/Livan Hernandez level than whatever level it is we as fans aspire to. In other words, our bets are still going to be on the development of our own farm raised young guns than on any outside hired thug, and having been burned by that bet this season, I'm nervous about rolling the dice on it again for 2009.