A row of purple seats rings Coors Field. The seats — 20 rows up on the upper deck and just six rows from the top — are one mile above sea level, a tribute to the mountains’ majesty and an indelible reminder that baseball played at high altitude is a game of a very different color.

In the Rockies’ 20th season, 10 years after the team installed a humidor at Coors Field to help bring normalcy to baseball at 20th and Blake, the franchise is as puzzled as ever about how to play baseball at 5,280 feet. The one lesson learned in their excruciating 2012 season is that, at last, the franchise finally must solve what general manager Dan O’Dowd calls a “Rubik’s Cube” if it’s ever going to produce a consistent winner.

“It’s taken me all these years to wrap my arms around this, from an overall standpoint,” said O’Dowd, in his 13th season.

His conclusion? It’s past time to address the issue head on. It’s time to get radical, if necessary, and not worry about what the rest of baseball thinks. What that means isn’t clear, however. The team’s headline-grabbing move this summer was instituting a “paired pitching system” featuring four starters working on a 75-pitch limit and four “piggyback” relievers.

With their starting pitchers melting down at a record pace during the first half of the season, O’Dowd, with the backing of owner Dick Monfort, implemented the change in mid-June, which O’Dowd said as recently as two weeks ago he planned to use next year. On Friday, however, the Rockies said they were going back to a more traditional five-man starting staff, but with three “piggyback” relievers, and starters would be limited to about 90 pitches.

The evolving rotation plans aren’t the only thing new, however. Longstanding issues — injuries to pitchers, breakdown of position players’ bodies, feeble hitting on the road and failures in developing personnel — are all being intently examined. The quest is to get a better grip on what playing baseball at high altitude has to do with problems plaguing the Rockies, on pace for their worst season ever.

O’Dowd refers to it all as Project 5183 — so named within the executive offices at Coors Field in honor of the ballpark’s base elevation. He chooses his words carefully when asked about it.

“No. 1, I don’t want to make us appear that we are making excuses,” he said. “No. 2, I don’t want to make it sound like an insurmountable problem. I don’t want to convey a sense of hopelessness. That’s not how I feel.”

He has studied 20 years of data on hitting and pitching at high altitude. He has 10 years of data on weather patterns at Coors Field. He has commissioned studies on heat, humidity and barometric pressure on game days. The Rockies even have their own miniature weather station at Coors Field.

“We have attempted to contact any individual that we felt had done research on the effects of altitude,” O’Dowd said.

His conclusion?

“We now realize where we are at and where we play,” O’Dowd said. “I think we need to attack it in unique ways that create an opportunity and a competitive advantage for us. … There is not going to be one easy answer to any of this.”

Bichette and the Bombers

While putting pitch counts on starters and having “hybrid” relievers grabs headlines, O’Dowd said it’s only the most visible part of a plan to remake the franchise. O’Dowd’s critics, meanwhile, contend that ever-changing pitching plans, as well as a reshuffled front office structure he pitched to Monfort in July that put former assistant general manager Bill Geivett in charge of the team’s day-to-day operations, are attempts to camouflage a terrible season and bad personnel decisions, and to buy more time to institute a new approach.

“I understand it completely,” Geivett said of the criticism. “I have been in the game forever. Anytime you do something nontraditional, I understand that the normal fan is going to say, ‘What are you doing?’ I would, before I came to the Rockies. But we have probably been too traditional in a lot of things that we’ve done.”

The disintegration of this year’s team, combined with management embracing the four-man rotation idea, left fans scratching their heads. Judging from online commentators, there is a consensus among fans that new management is necessary, not just new plans. After all, nothing seemed out of kilter when the early Rockies teams averaged 50 home victories a season, or the 2007 Rockies made the World Series, or the 2009 Rockies made the playoffs.

Dante Bichette, one of the famed Blake Street Bombers, said the philosophy that worked when Coors Field first opened, overwhelming visiting teams in Denver, can still work.

“It can be the biggest home-field advantage in sports if you use it right,” Bichette said. “You have to make it exciting. You have to hit.”

In 1996, the Bombers were at the peak of their powers, hitting 221 home runs (149 at Coors). The Rockies went 55-26 at home. The downside was their 28-53 road record.

O’Dowd counters that solving the pitching conundrum is paramount if the Rockies are ever to consistently make the playoffs.

“We’re trying to figure out a model for sustained success rather than periodic success,” he said.

The new plan, announced to pitchers before Friday’s game, includes a five-man starting staff that will be on a pitch count, usually around 90. Three piggyback relievers will be used to back them up. Geivett said the change from the four-man rotation was in large part because of rest and recovery issues.

“For the length of the season, can the guys recover when you have all those consecutive days? We were in situations where we had to bump a guy back, or use another guy,” Geivett said. “Recovery was one issue. Another was development, because their side work was really limited between games, on how they could work on their delivery; that was difficult.”

There was also grumbling among players, though no one had gone public with complaints.

Colorado’s pitching showed marked improvement for several years after the introduction of the humidor in 2002. The team’s home earned run average in 2009 was a respectable 4.41, not much higher than the team’s 4.03 road ERA.

But the Rockies’ pitching numbers regressed badly this season, starting in April. There were theories about why, one being that the abnormally hot and dry spring and early summer affected how the ball carried at Coors. June temperatures, for instance, were six degrees higher than average in Denver.

“I kept saying the hotness and dryness caused all of this, but from a scientific vantage point, there is no validation,” O’Dowd said. “It has been really, really perplexing.”

Trying the humidor

This isn’t the Rockies’ first attempt to combat the effect of playing at high altitude. In 2002, O’Dowd defied tradition and had a humidor installed at Coors Field to store baseballs at a constant 70 degrees and 50 percent relative humidity, instead of Denver’s typical 30 percent. The idea was to reduce the bounciness of the baseball and slightly increase its weight so it wouldn’t travel so far.

The plan worked. The average number of home runs and runs scored at Coors Field dropped 20 to 25 percent on average from 2002 through 2011. For the first seven seasons at Coors Field, there were an average of 3.2 home runs per game, compared with 1.9 home runs at the Rockies’ road games. During the prehumidor days, teams combined to average 13.6 runs a game at Coors. That figure dropped to 11.1 from 2002 through 2011.

But early this season, it appeared the humidor lost its power. Opponents raked Rockies starters, who were on pace to have the highest ERA since Tigers starters posted a 6.64 ERA in 1996. Even with improved pitching during the past few weeks, the Rockies’ home ERA stands at 5.91, by far the highest in baseball, and their 5.12 overall ERA is the worst in baseball. Opponents are hitting .306 at Coors.

“We’re tackling a monster in Coors Field,” manager Jim Tracy said. “The ballpark this year has played as though we’re in the prehumidor era.”

Right-hander Jeremy Guthrie, a flyball pitcher acquired by O’Dowd in an offseason trade with the Orioles, was supposed to anchor the Rockies’ rotation. Instead, he left Denver shell-shocked after posting a 1-6 record with a 9.51 ERA at Coors Field, allowing 14 home runs in just over 41 innings.

“All things considered equally, the ball broke less at Coors Field,” Guthrie said after being traded to Kansas City at midseason. “There were times that I didn’t feel like my pitches had the same bite.”

Despite the Guthrie disaster, the Rockies believe they can find a workable solution for pitching at Coors Field. Namely, have starters throw fewer innings and limit pitch counts.

“Gone are the days where one of your pitchers gets well over 100 pitches,” Geivett said of the new philosophy.

O’Dowd said: “We have found that every starter who has pitched here for 185 to 200 innings for three consecutive years over the lifetime of this franchise has broken down with a significant injury. That inability to keep pitchers healthy has been one of our biggest struggles. We have to find a way to change that.”

The Rockies have had 49 pitchers throw 150 or more innings in a season, according to the club’s data. The following season, 27 spent at least 15 days on the disabled list. That’s 55.1 percent, compared with the major-league average of 35.7 percent. Jeff Francis is one of those pitchers. He pitched 182 innings in 2005, 199 in 2006 and a career-high 215 in 2007 when he helped lead the Rockies to the World Series with a 17-9 record. In 2008 he was shut down in early September with shoulder soreness after throwing just over 143 innings. Offseason surgery to repair a torn labrum in his shoulder sidelined him for the entire 2009 season.

“It’s impossible to know if my injury was caused by altitude,” Francis said. “I mean, other people have surgeries in other places all the time. But I’ve talked to some people who have wondered if throwing more pitches while you’re tired could (cause) injury. I really don’t know.”

Jekyll at home, Hyde on road

It’s not just obscene ERAs that have bedeviled the Rockies for 20 years. Inept offense on the road has also plagued them. The Rockies traditionally have been an offensive juggernaut at home and among baseball’s worst- hitting road teams. This season is no different. The Rockies are hitting .299 at Coors Field, best in baseball, but .238 on the road, 28th overall. Since the installation of the humidor, the Rockies have ranked last in road batting average four times and in the bottom five every year but one.

The reason seems simple: The Rockies go from a hitter’s heaven to the real world. At Coors Field, pitches don’t break as much in the light air, and batted balls take off like a jet. On the road, pitches come to life, diving and darting.

“I don’t like us to use it as an excuse,” said Rockies veteran Todd Helton, who has a career .350 batting average at Coors Field and a .289 average on the road. “I think a lot of it is about our mental approach.”

This month, the Rockies lost back-to-back 1-0 games at Atlanta. Looking forward, O’Dowd wants a more fundamentally sound offensive team that uses speed and the hit-and-run play, and doesn’t rely on home runs. He believes it will translate to better performances on the road.

“That’s the way we have to play the game overall,” O’Dowd said. “But I think that’s starts in our developmental process. I think we have to define exactly how we want to play the game, and I think that’s how Bill (Geivett) is going to help me in this process.”

Bichette, who hit 40 home runs and drove in 128 runs in the Rockies’ first season at Coors Field in 1995, disagrees with that philosophy.

“It’s going to be tough to ever perform well on the road for Colorado. You are going to be less than average on the road because of the way the ball breaks,” he said. “That’s why you have to hammer people at home.”

The puzzle of playing at high altitude, it appears, isn’t going to be solved anytime soon.

Patrick Saunders: 303-954-1428, psaunders@denverpost.com or twitter.com/psaundersdp Staff writer Troy E. Renck contributed to this report.

Does the humidor work?

Yes, according to an article titled “Corked Bats, Juiced Balls, and Humidors: The Physics of Cheating in Baseball,” published in the June 2011 issue of the American Journal of Physics.

Researchers calculated that a humidity increase from 30 percent to 50 percent when storing baseballs at Coors Field would take 14 feet off a 380-foot flyball — enough to decrease the chances of a home run by 25 percent. That is almost exactly the percentage of decrease in home runs at Coors Field from 2002-10