The Rock­ies returned home to LoDo Wednes­day night search­ing for their lost offen­sive mojo and count­ing on the sol­id pitch­ing that has been a sil­ver lin­ing dur­ing their recent fall from grace.

Well, the offense is still miss­ing — at least when the game was still on the line. And their pitch­ing took a beat­ing in a 13–6 loss to the surg­ing Hous­ton Astros at Coors Field. The Astros — who’ve whipped Col­orado in sev­en con­sec­u­tive games dat­ing back to Aug. 15, 2018 — are on a sev­en-game win­ning streak. They tore into Col­orado pitch­ing for 20 hits, includ­ing four home runs.

The Rock­ies? After an 11–3 start that had some star­ry-eyed fans talk­ing about play­offs and per­haps even a divi­sion title, have now lost eight of 10 and are tee­ter­ing just two games above .500 at 13–11.

Wednesday’s game had the mak­ings of a duel between two tal­ent­ed young pitch­ers — lefty Fram­ber Valdez for the Astros and right-han­der Ryan Castel­lani for the Rock­ies. Valdez won the duel.

Valdez, who owns a 1.72 ERA after five starts, baf­fled the Rock­ies before fal­ter­ing in the eighth. His final line: three runs allowed on sev­en hits with five strike­outs over 7 2/3 innings.

Castel­lani, so good in his first two major-league starts, got roughed up. The Astros slugged him for five runs on eight hits over 5 2/3 innings. He was sharp ear­ly, yield­ing only a solo home run to catch­er Martín Mal­don­a­do in the third.

But the fifth got messy for Castel­lani. After sur­pris­ing Alex Cor­rea with a big curve­ball for a called strike, Castel­lani threw it again on the next pitch and Cor­rea blast­ed it 436 feet and into the left-field bleach­ers. A triple by Kyle Tuck­er, fol­lowed by Tay­lor Jones’ RBI sin­gles stretched Houston’s lead to 3–1.

The lead grew to 6–1 in the sixth, on a two-run triple by Tuck­er off reliev­er Jeff Hoff­man and a sub­se­quent RBI sin­gle by Jones. It grew to 10–1 in the sev­enth with four more runs on six hits, four of them off Hoff­man. The right-han­der entered the evening hav­ing allowed just one run in 9 2/3 innings, but he was charged with five runs in two-thirds of an inning Wednes­day night.

The Rock­ies had the mak­ings of a big sec­ond inning until short­stop Car­los Cor­rea short-cir­cuit­ed the ral­ly with a gor­geous play. Raimel Tapia’s sin­gle scored Matt Kemp to put Col­orado in front, 1–0. Then Chris Owings sin­gled and Ryan McMa­hon was hit by a pitch, load­ing the bases. But Cor­rea made a div­ing stop on Drew Butera’s smash into the hole between short and third and turned it into an inning-end­ing dou­ble play.

The Astros, how­ev­er, suf­fered what could be a big loss when star third base­man Alex Breg­man pulled up lame run­ning to first base after hit­ting a lead­off dou­ble in the fourth. He bare­ly made it to sec­ond base. The Astros offi­cial­ly called it “right ham­string dis­com­fort,” adding that Breg­man is “day-to-day.”

Col­orado has gone 3–16 vs. the Astros since they moved to the Amer­i­can League in 2013. The two teams fin­ish up their brief two-game series at Coors Field on Thurs­day afternoon.