SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Park is usually a great place to be a pitcher. Up until Thursday, that was not the case for Austin Gomber. 

In five previous starts against the Giants, all in the City by the Bay, Gomber had allowed 21 runs in 17 1/3 innings. That's good for a 10.90 ERA, the highest mark against the 23 teams Gomber has faced in his career. But he was able to reverse the narrative on Thursday afternoon, holding the Giants to a pair of runs to secure a 4-2 victory and a series win for the Rockies.

"Obviously, you get tired of pitching bad, right?" Gomber said. "This is a place that I have not had my best outings in the past, so for me, it was just kind of time to put a stop to it -- time to put a stop to the way I was throwing the ball, time to put a stop to my struggles here. 

"I wanted to pitch well, and I just wasn't going to allow it to happen today."

Gomber wasn't the only one to vanquish his San Francisco demons. The Rockies have struggled against the Giants since the beginning of 2021, dropping 21 of their last 28 matchups -- including six of nine this season. This series win marks Colorado's first in San Francisco in nearly three years, when the Rockies took two of three from the Giants from June 24-26, 2019. 

"They've had a good ballclub here the last couple years, they've played us tough," manager Bud Black said. "I like the way the guys came up this morning and worked prior to the game. It was great energy, as always, but it was a little bit different. And Gomby, I think, set a great tone."

Gomber pitched around traffic early on. In the first inning, he gave up a leadoff triple to Austin Slater, who entered the game having gone 6-for-11 against Gomber in his career. Gomber was able to strand Slater at third, but he ran into trouble again in the second inning, surrendering another triple and putting the Rockies in a two-run deficit. 

After that, though, Gomber was in control. He cruised through four scoreless innings, allowing just two more Giants to reach base through the remainder of his outing.

The Rockies' offense played small ball to lift Gomber to his third win of the season, taking advantage of a series of defensive miscues by the Giants. San Francisco made three errors in the fourth inning alone, which set the table for Colorado to charge in and take over the lead. 

"We strung some hits together -- I thought that was big as well -- but we stayed on attack against a very tough pitcher [in Logan Webb]," Black said. "[The Giants] helped us a little bit in the fourth, defensively, but we kept battling, kept playing. But again, we could've done a little more damage as well."

The Rockies left eight runners on base on Thursday, which is a touch higher than their season average of 7.1 left on base per game. Gomber left the game with a slim one-run advantage, but third baseman Ryan McMahon eventually came through with a clutch RBI single in the seventh inning to pad Colorado's lead.  

"We know it's just kind of a matter of time for Gomber," McMahon said. "Today, he came out there, and he was just a bulldog out there. You could tell that he was competing and that he really wanted to get through those guys."

Thursday's win gave Gomber another quality start -- his sixth this season, which is tied with Chad Kuhl for the most on the club. It also marks the fifth quality start by a Rockies starter in their last six games, a welcoming trend after a start to the season in which Colorado's rotation has been one of the worst in baseball.

Three of those quality starts came in this series in San Francisco, with Colorado's starters combining to allow six earned runs in 18 innings. When the pitching is steady, Gomber said, it picks the whole team up and delivers some much-needed momentum during a tough stretch of the season.

"It was kind of just up to Germán [Márquez], Antonio [Senzatela] and me in our nights to make a statement," Gomber said. "What's happened here in the past isn't going to happen going forward. We got tired of coming here, we got tired of not pitching well.

"The intensity that every guy took the mound with was just a little bit different."