On June 21, the Colorado Rockies began the inevitable decline that happens to every team in the marathon of a Major League Baseball season. After an impressive two-and-a-half-month run of incredible highs, they hit the lull. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Think about it. The Rockies went gone 5-13 from June 21 – July 9, including an eight-game losing skid to start their slide. The All-Star break started Monday. Now, with the exception of All-Stars Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon, DJ LeMahieu and Greg Holland, the players will get a bit of a break to relax and rejuvenate.

“I think it’ll help this team,” Arenado said prior to Sunday’s series-clinching win against the White Sox. “The break will be huge. The way we’re playing is just not very good baseball at all. We’re not pitching very good; we’re not hitting at all. In the break we can maybe get away, recover, recharge the batteries a little bit. It might help us big time.”

Although they headed into the break on a high note – a 10-0 victory and a near no-hitter by rookie Kyle Freeland – the Rockies have plenty of things to improve upon when they return from the four-day break.

“We just got to clean up a lot of things,” Arenado said. “Pitching needs to do a better job; we need to be a better offensive team. We’re a good hitting team. There’s a difference between scoring, we score a lot of runs, but we’re not a very good development team. We don’t develop guys the way we should – moving guys over, driving guys in from third. [We’ve] got to do a better job of that. We need to shut down innings. Lately, I feel like when we score, we give up runs like the next inning. We need to clean that up. I just think with our overall game, we need to do a better job.”

The Rockies’ outstanding play earlier in the season, garnering as much as a 21-game cushion over .500, put them in a position to survive this lull. Unlike years past, the losses that came near the All-Star break didn’t doom the season.

“We’re in a great spot, there’s no doubt about that,” Arenado said. “You know, it’s so funny because we lost so many games, if we didn’t lose that, I wonder where we’d be. But that’s not the cards we played at the same time. It is what it is. We have to deal with what we have in front of us. To expect where we are going into the second half, it’s a good feeling.

“I think we expect, as a team, to win ballgames now so when you lose the way we [did], it doesn’t feel very good. It’s hard to look at the bright side, but it’ll feel good going into the break knowing that we’re in it and we’re actually in a pretty good spot considering how we’ve lost so many games lately. We’re where we want to be, we’re competing, but there’s so much room to grow.”

Arenado hopes his club can come back to form after the All-Star break and look back on the past three weeks as a small hiccup in an otherwise successful year – one that is the most successful of any Rockies club up to this point in the season.

“We did a good job of competing early and doing what he had to do,” Arenado said. “This is baseball. You’re going to go through tough stretches where you lose or are close, and you just go through bad stretches, and we’re on one now. Hopefully we can clean that up and get back to winning like we did before.”

After coming back from the DL for a right quad strain on Friday, Gerardo Parra has rekindled the spark that the Rockies have lacked of late. In his first game back, he put up three hits in a 12-4 rout of the White Sox. He was 3-for-5 with three runs scored and two RBIs in Sunday’s victory.

Parra, too, thinks the break will be good for the Rockies as they rediscover the recipe for success they concocted at the beginning of the year.

“We got a great team. I think that these four days we can relax. Everybody is coming hard, and we can just play hard this second half. We have a good chance to make the playoffs,” Parra said. “We have a a great opportunity, and I think at this point we just play harder every day, harder than yesterday.”

As for the lack of offense the Rockies have produced as of late, that’s something Parra believes is on its way back up, and it doesn’t concern him in the slightest.

“We’re coming back strong with [Ian] Desmond coming back,” Parra said. “I know CarGo is getting a little bit stronger, but he’s coming back. We need him in the second half, and he’s coming strong. I know CarGo is back and we – Denver and Colorado – know who CarGo is.”

For now, all that matters is moving forward with their eye on the playoff prize.

“We don’t want our team thinking about what happened in the last month, just only stay focused for after the second half,” Parra said.