DENVER -- A pitcher can't elevate in the highest elevation in baseball.
There wasn't much more for Ivan Nova or the Pirates to cull from their 13-3 trouncing by the Rockies on this Sunday matinee at Coors Field, other than that they lost two of three in the series, they slipped back below .500 at 49-50, and they lost a small step in the Central race, now three games behind the still-reeling Brewers.
And?
"We'll move on," Jordy Mercer was telling me afterward. "Get on out of here, just move on."
Yep. Sounds about right. Including from the manager's perspective.
"All that happened these two nights," Clint Hurdle said of Saturday and Sunday, "is that we ran into a good ballclub at home. We're going to San Francisco. It'll be good baseball. Short-term memory. Fresh and back at it. We'll be ready to go."
The "good baseball" line wasn't an accident. As much as the Pirates' offense benefited from Coors in the Friday opener, a 13-5 thrashing in their favor, the Rockies' roster is built for the place, and that was painfully illustrated in their taking the final two by a combined 20-6.
Mostly on the mound, actually.
Nova, who'd been tagged for 10 hits in his previous start against the Brewers, had raised some red flags among the coaching staff by allowing his pitches to sail more than usual. In this one, he started off sharp through two innings but wound up lasting five-plus for a line of seven runs, nine hits, a hit batsman, a walk, a wild pitch and ... well, here are two of those hits, by Charlie Blackmon and Trevor Story:
Hurdle expressed at least mild concern for Nova's pattern of late.
"I thought he came out clean. The first two frames looked good," he said. "After that, the ball started to elevate on him a little bit. And it's a hard combination, being here, when you're behind in the count and up in the zone. The good news is, he feels healthy, he feels strong. We've just got to help him fine-tune his delivery, his release point, to stay on top of the ball and get some better sink."
I asked how much of this was a Coors thing.
"He's had a little bit of this going on. It just got accentuated today."
I brought that up with Nova, too:
He didn't come across even a fraction as worried as Hurdle did, and neither did Francisco Cervelli.
"Nah, that's nothing," Cervelli said of his longtime friend. "It's Coors Field, bro."
Which, believe it or not, can be an advantage. If you know the territory.
Kyle Freeland, Colorado's terrific 24-year-old lefty, was born 10 minutes north of Coors Field, and it sure shows. Fresh off 8 1/3 innings of no-hit ball against the White Sox, he carried a similarly dominant vibe Sunday, pounding the Pirates at the knees for a six-inning line of two runs and six hits. He made a couple mistakes, and Coors made him pay, notably on David Freese's 449-foot shot to open the sixth. But he otherwise was poised, sharp and down, down, down.
"He seemed like he stayed out of the middle of the plate," Freese said without irony, even though his shot came off a pitch right down the pipe. "It's a park that brings necessity to that. His offspeed was working, too, kept us off-balance."
DK'S THREE THOUGHTS
1. Man, Jordy's picking it.
Yeah, it was a lousy loss and all that. But when my dad was taking me to ballgames as a child, this was the sort of stuff I wanted to see:
That Nova pitch arrived at 93.4 mph, and it went off Story's bat at about the speed of light. It's one of the hardest-struck grounders I've seen all summer.
Mercer takes a step and a half to the lip of the outfield grass, somehow keeps his hand connected to his wrist upon reaching the glove, rolls to one knee and fires a bullet of his own across the diamond for the narrow out.
I mean, wow.
"Yeah, he hit it," Mercer would tell me. "If that ball hits me in the hand or wrist instead of the webbing ... I don't even want to think about it."
2. Josh Bell is a beast.
And no, not just because he's a very large young man with shoulders so broad that Mike Tomlin joked in a Bradenton visit -- at least it seemed he was joking -- that Bell profiled at middle linebacker.
Bell added a hit, a walk and an RBI to a July rampage that's seen him bat .311 with three home runs, 10 extra-base hits and 17 RBIs in 18 games.
"Josh has shown the ability to strike a baseball with alarming impact," Hurdle put it, as only he can. "He's got bad intentions when he gets in the box. He's been able to wait on the ball, keep his hands back, then go after it."
"I'm just feeling comfortable," Bell said with a shrug. "A little more every day."
3. Why is Wade LeBlanc here?
No, really, why?
He entered in the sixth for Nova and was promptly tagged for four runs, five hits and two home run balls that the FAA estimated would land somewhere in Wyoming by nightfall.
If you're into analyzing symptoms, that's cool. I prefer to go for root causes. The Pirates' main seven-man bullpen currently has one of its own draft picks on the roster: Tony Watson, who was taken under Dave Littlefield and Ed Creech. (Stephen Brault, called up this weekend as an emergency eighth guy, is actually a starter.) The top bullpen prospects by a broad margin in Class AAA Indianapolis are Edgar Santana and Dovydas Neverauskas, both signed as international free agents.
Ten years of drafting under this front office has produced the eighth-worst overall success rate in Major League Baseball and zero relievers since a year and change of Justin Wilson.
There are symptoms and there are causes.
ON DECK
It's off to San Francisco, where the last-place Giants are 3-0 against the Pirates, 35-61 against everyone else. But the former was built on a sweep at PNC Park June 30-July 2, which Hurdle cited in a hurry while cringing when asked about the next 19 games being against opponents below .500.
"This is the big leagues," Hurdle said. "Nobody goes out to not play well. Nobody goes out to get embarrassed."