PHOENIX — If Thursday night’s performance at Chase Field had been a Broadway play, the Colorado Rockies’ show would have closed after one performance. Before the reviews even came out.

That’s how bad opening night was for the Rockies, whose third-inning pratfall set a bushel of records and set the stage for a 16-1 loss to the defending National League champion Arizona Diamondbacks.

Talk about March Madness. It was Colorado’s worst opening-day defeat, topping a 10-1 loss at Miami on March 31, 2014.

Left-hander Kyle Freeland, making his third opening day start, endured one of the worst games of his career. In a scant 2 1/3 innings, he gave up 10 runs on 10 hits, including a two-run homer to Lourdes Gurriel in the first inning. The 10 runs Freeland surrendered were a career-high.

Freeland departed in the third inning and was relieved by Anthony Molina, making his major league debut. The D-backs pounded Molina for six runs on six hits in one-third of an inning.

About that third inning: Arizona scored 14 runs, ripped 13 hits, and sent 18 batters to the plate — the most in all categories by Rockies pitching in a single inning in franchise history. The D-backs’ 14 runs were tied for the fourth-most in an inning since 1900.

Before Thursday night, no team had ever allowed 14-plus runs in an inning in its first game of a season. The previous high was way back on April 14, 1925, when the St. Louis Browns allowed 12 runs to Cleveland in the eighth inning.

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