“Just keep trying to pitch the way you always do and see what happens.”

Kershaw gave up two home runs and walked an uncommon four batters in four innings during his first start at Coors Field this season. Saturday’s loss was an example of the other ways Coors Field can torment visiting pitchers.

Will Smith’s two-out RBI double staked Kershaw to a 1-0 lead in the first inning.

But Charlie Blackmon squibbed a ground ball (56.5 mph off the bat) away from the shift for an infield single and Brendan Rodgers dribbled one (32.7 mph) onto the infield grass for another. When Jose Iglesias hit one harder, 91 mph, to the left side, it went off third baseman Max Muncy for a run-scoring error. Randal Grichuk made it a two-run inning with a 97.9 mph single to right field.

“There’s the (Charlie) Blackmon ground ball (for the first infield hit) in the first inning and it was a 10-pitch at- bat. Then there was a kind of a blocked ball, there was a ball up the middle I think, the shot to Munce,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “There’s just things that happened. That’s just, that’s baseball.”

Muncy’s inning-extending error was his first in the series but his sixth in 44 games at third base this year.

“I give him credit, man, he stayed in there and tried to take it off the chest and it went off his arm,” Roberts said. “But he turned around I think an inning or two later and made a couple really nice plays. So Max is playing good defense. I know that in the last 10 days, there’s a few plays that I think we’d like to have him come up with. But I think overall, my eyes, the metrics, everything says he’s playing good defense.”

The Dodgers got Kershaw the lead back in the third inning. Trea Turner extended his hitting streak to 17 games with a solo home run and Freddie Freeman followed with a double, chugging into third when left fielder Yonathan Daza fumbled the ball. Hanser Alberto drove him in with a two-out single.

Kershaw carried that 3-2 advantage into the sixth inning and retired C.J. Cron to start the inning. Four consecutive hits followed. One was a bloop single at 73.7 mph but the other three all left the bat at over 100 mph including a two-run triple into the right field corner by Grichuk.

“It’s a big field,” Dodgers catcher Austin Barnes said. “It’s not that you have to be perfect here or anything like that. But it’s a big field, there’s a lot of hits out there.”

The four hits that ended Kershaw’s night in the sixth inning came in a span of six pitches.

“It was a grind tonight. Overall, I thought my stuff was actually okay,” Kershaw said. “After the first inning especially, I felt like I settled in and got in a pretty good groove there.

“The sixth inning, the curveball that Rodgers hit came back into him a little bit. The other two sliders I thought were well-placed and decent but maybe I had done the same thing too many times. They put good swings on them, hit them hard. That was the frustrating part. Can’t really do anything about the Iglesias curveball. But other than that, it just happened fast unfortunately in that inning.

“Just kind of got away from me.”

Saturday was the fifth consecutive game in which the Dodgers have scored in the first inning. But their offense went to sleep after the two-run rally in the third.

They had just one more baserunner as Rockies starter Kyle Freeland and his bullpen combined to retire 19 of the final 21 Dodgers batters, a flashback to the Dodgers losing four of their first five games at Coors Field this season.