This story was excerpted from Thomas Harding's Rockies Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Rockies right-hander Germán Márquez is trying to adhere to a process -- assess what works, correct what doesn’t, reduce a 6.71 ERA this year (on the heels of a 6.12 ERA in the 13 starts he made last year after appearing in his first All-Star Game) pitch by pitch. It sounds cliché, but it’s the only way. 

The reason the advice isn’t hackneyed is that humans have a hard time reducing such an unsightly ERA to a few bites. A couple days before his last start -- seven runs, six earned, with a career-high-tying three homers in five innings against the Marlins on Wednesday -- Márquez expressed some frustration that a plan that he still believes is sound simply isn’t working. 

Márquez moved to Denver for the winter, instead of staying with his family and extended support system in Venezuela, specifically to train his body and his pitches in altitude.  

“It’s hard when you work hard, it’s hard when you sacrifice things to be successful,” Márquez said. “When things don’t go the way you’d like, it’s a little frustrating. I sacrificed my family time to be here in the snow, working. We were here. 

“I worked hard to be No. 1, to be one of the better pitchers in the Major Leagues. But baseball, life, are always like that. We have to keep positive.”

He also built a plan to hone his tunneling of pitches. The fastball and slider look the same out of his hand before the fastball hops and the slider breaks downward. His two-seam sinker and changeup -- same thing. 

But in games, he’s developed a penchant for missing badly in the strike zone. His stuff fails him when he has the batter where he wants him and the tunneling should keep hitters off balance. He has given up a 7.00 ERA with a home run and two doubles on 0-2 pitches. On all counts with two strikes, he has yielded three homers and two doubles. 

The start against the Marlins became a whack-a-mole of issues. 

Márquez entered the game with a 6.00 first-inning ERA. So he trimmed the longer, wavier hair he has been fashioning and, more importantly, planned with pitching coach Darryl Scott to throw fewer pitches but more intensity at the end of the pregame bullpen session. Although he walked the game’s leadoff hitter, he had clean first and second innings. 

But in the third he yielded, on successive pitches, a Miguel Rojas homer, a Jacob Stallings single and a Willians Astudillo long ball. The Astudillo homer was the only good one of the three. 

Márquez displayed frustrated body language that calmed after manager Bud Black made a mound visit in the fourth. And as has been the case in other starts, with runs already in the barn, Márquez finished better than he started. 

When asked afterward, Black painstakingly analyzed the “less than a handful” of trouble spots batter by batter. Were there answers? No. But it’s the only way to find them. 

“I just have to fix what went wrong,” Márquez said, knowing that he must set aside frustration to find execution.