DENVER -- Sometimes, the best thing about Coors Field is riding off into the sunset with the ballpark in your rearview mirror. Miles Mikolas has had that kind of experience at Coors Field, but he takes a “cowboy-up” approach to pitching there, and Tuesday night was no exception.

Mikolas matched a career high in high-altitude Coors Field on Tuesday, but it was as far from a “personal best” as he could get. He allowed 10 runs, all earned, in 2 2/3 innings en route to a 16-5 loss to open the three-game set, allowing double-digit runs for the first time since Aug. 13, 2014, when the Rays tagged him for 10 runs.

The loss snapped a seven-game win streak for the Cardinals and cut their lead over the Brewers in the NL Central to one game.

“I don't like the results,” Mikolas said. “How many hits [off me], 14 total? I would say four of them were pretty well hit, and I'd say the other 10 were not. Tip your cowboy hat to them putting the ball in play, but a lot of weak contact, jam shots, nubbers that found their way through. 

“Sometimes, you just have to roll with the tumbleweeds and deal with your bad luck. Get right back on that pony again.”

From manager Oliver Marmol’s perspective, the outing raised no concerns about his All-Star starting pitcher. 

“He's perfectly fine,” Marmol said. “Tough outing. At the end of the day, these are the ones you forget even happened. Wake up the next day and get back at it. The reality is, [the Rockies] were aggressive early -- I believe five hits on the first pitch. They scored some runs when he missed the middle a couple of times, and then everything else they put in play found a hole. There are days those are at people.  Today, everything they hit found grass somewhere. Tough day.”

Mikolas entered the game with a 2.92 ERA and saw it elevate to 3.50 in Denver’s thin, mile-high air. His Coors Field ERA rose to 13.50 in four appearances, good for 20 runs over 13 1/3 innings. Among his career-high 14 hits allowed was a three-run homer to left off the bat of C.J. Cron in the first frame. The Rockies scored nine more in the third, with Cron blasting a two-run double to right to knock Mikolas from the game.

“The only ones they really hit hard were in the stands, and then the one kind of right at me and a couple hard ground balls,” Mikolas said, adding that he thought he made good pitches. “The key to having a lot of innings is staying with your approach. What got me to 140-some innings at this point is what's going to get me to, hopefully, 200-some innings by the end of the season and into October, because that's what made me successful.  

“I'm not going to go back to the drawing board and say, ‘Wow, I need to strike everybody out, because I can't keep giving up infield singles.’ That's not who I am. I'm not going to reinvent myself. That's how you lose track of things and then fall off the horse, so to speak.” 

That’s the good news. To say the start was uncharacteristic for Mikolas would be an understatement. He’s held opponents to two earned runs or less in eight of his previous 11 starts. If the anomaly outing makes it look like something broke Mikolas, he’d beg to differ.

“Again, tip your hat -- they definitely had an approach to maybe not try to do so much, just take those singles, and sometimes it's death by 1,000 cuts,” Mikolas said of the game in which 16 of the Rockies’ 22 hits went for singles. “I came into the game saying, ‘I'm going to keep the ball down and make them hit singles and earn it.’ And they hit like, 12 singles. Maybe that was the wrong strategy. Maybe I should’ve let him pop it up or something, I don't know. Whatever I did obviously wasn't the best thing to do.”

For Mikolas, the bad taste of another rough night in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains is already long lost from his memory bank. 

“There's not a whole lot you can really get upset about -- just roll your eyes, and [say], ‘Woe is me,’ but that's the game, that's the sport,” Mikolas said. “I'll put it behind me very easily. Like, I already forgot about it. That's yesterday's news.”