DENVER — That was different.
The Rockies had evidently had enough. The Padres too, it seemed.
The team with the best record in the major leagues and the team threatening to finish with the worst record in history essentially reversed roles for an afternoon.
A day after scoring their biggest margin of victory in 57 seasons of being a major league team, the Padres lost to the Rockies 9-3 on Sunday.
“162,” Manny Machado said, referring to the length of the season and the truth that any baseball team can beat any other baseball team on a given day. “It’s a beautiful thing.
The Rockies won for the seventh time this season.
It would be the last one managed by Bud Black, whose firing was announced after the game.
Third base coach Warren Schaeffer will take over a team that got to 7-33 Sunday, moving out of a tie with the 1988 Orioles (6-34) for the worst-ever start to a season.
The Padres (25-14) finished 6-3 on a road trip that took them to Pittsburgh and New York before they arrived here Thursday.
“Good road trip overall,” manager Mike Shildt said. “… Absolutely, that’s good baseball.”
The Padres had said at the trip’s outset that their goal was to have a winning road record after going 3-3 and 2-4 on their first two trips of the season. The swept the Pirates, lost two of three to the Yankees and finished by taking two of three at Coors Field.
But they also finished quietly.
They took a 1-0 lead and then stirred just a couple times after Sunday’s first inning.
The Padres had 15 fewer hits and 17 fewer baserunners and looked 100% less formidable than they had the day before.
Or, really, at almost any time this season.
Their five hits at a place where they had 40 over the previous two games were fewer than in all but eight games in 2025.
“Their guy was dealing,” Machado said. “You gotta give him credit.”
Rockies starter Germán Márquez, who came into the game with a 9.90 ERA and allowed six runs in 4⅔ innings at Petco Park a month earlier, yielded a run on three hits and a walk over seven innings.
Padres starter Nick Pivetta, who came into the game with a 2.01 ERA and shut out the Rockies over seven innings a month earlier, allowed six runs in four innings.
“Attacked the strike zone as best I could,” Pivetta said. “I gave up too many hits and hard contact. … They were swinging a lot, swinging early, just aggressive on the plate.”
It was not Pivetta’s worst outing at Coors Field, where his ERA is now 17.34 in four starts, down from the 18.90 it was when the day began.
He took the mound with a lead, as the Padres scored in the first inning for the third straight game.
It wasn’t the five runs they got in Saturday’s first inning, and it was nowhere near enough for what the Rockies and Coors Field had in store for Pivetta, whose pitches don’t quite move in the same manner they nearer to sea level.
A single, a walk and clean-up hitter Hunter Goodman’s three-run homer with one out gave the Rockies a 3-1 lead in the first inning.
With Goodman’s 108.7 mph home run, Pivetta’s ERA had risen by 0.65 to 2.66. When Michael Toglia followed with a 109.4 mph single, Pivetta’s batting average allowed had risen by 16 points to .199.
Those numbers were both second-best in the National League coming in. By the time Pivetta’s day was over — and the Rockies had scored three more times and put seven balls in play at 100 mph or harder, more than in any of his previous seven starts — he ranked 13th in ERA (3.05) and was tied for seventh in average allowed (.205).
The Padres were down 6-1 after the Rockies scored three runs on a walk, a triple and two singles in the third.
A five-run deficit at Coors Field would not be as steep if the Padres had made any real progress toward getting into the Rockies’ bullpen.
But Marquez flooded the strike zone, the Padres hit the ball right at people and the Rockies’ right-hander needed just five pitches to get through the second inning, nine to get through the fourth and another nine to get through the sixth. He was at 65 pitches and had retired 16 consecutive batters through six innings.
That streak would become 17 batters at the start of the seventh before Gavin Sheets hit his second single of the game, Xander Bogaerts walked and Jake Cronenworth was hit by a pitch to load the bases.
That rally ended in an instant, as Jason Heyward grounded into a double play on the first pitch he saw.
Marquez was lifted after throwing 78 pitches.
The Rockies pushed their lead to 7-1 with two runs off Wandy Peralta in the seventh inning. The Padres scored two unearned runs against Angel Chivilli in the top of eighth before Ryan McMahon hit a home run off Sean Reynolds in the bottom of the inning.
The Rockies had allowed 55 runs over the previous three days. Of those, 21 came in a doubleheader on Thursday against the Tigers. The others came in the Padres’ 13-9 and 21-0 victories to start this series.
No team had given up more runs in a three-day span in 75 years.
“Every day is a new day,” Shildt said. “… They’re trying too.”
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