Colorado moved within one win of their first World Series by beating Arizona 4-1 on Sunday to take a 3-0 lead in the National League championship series.
With a cold rain falling, pitcher Josh Fogg shut down Arizona's bats in his first postseason start and Yorvit Torrealba hit a tiebreaking three-run homer to fuel the Rockies' victory.
The Rollin' Rockies have now won 20 of their past 21 games. They had a shot at sweeping the Diamondbacks yesterday, when pitcher Franklin Morales was to face Arizona's Micah Owings in a matchup of rookies.
The only other team to ever recover from a 3-0 deficit in a championship series was Boston in 2004 when they rallied past the New York Yankees.
Torrealba, who is 8-for-21 in the playoffs with seven RBIs, nearly had a home run in the third when he doubled off the centerfield wall. The stadium's pyrotechnics operator thought it was gone and set off some fireworks as Torrealba pulled into second base.
The real fireworks came in the sixth inning. Three pitches after watching one of Livan Hernandez's trademark "eephus" pitches cross the plate for a strike -- so slow it didn't register on the stadium scoreboard radar -- Torrealba hit a fastball 402 feet into the leftfield seats.
MVP hopeful Matt Holliday also homered off Hernandez, who fell to 7-3 lifetime in the playoffs. He allowed four earned runs on eight hits in 5 2-3 innings. Holliday's homer in the first inning was the first by either team in this series.
Fogg, who won Game 2 of the divisional series over Philadelphia in relief of Morales, scattered seven hits, including rookie Mark Reynolds' solo home run in the fourth, in six stellar innings. He didn't walk a batter and struck out three.
With the gametime temperature hovering at 6?C and a light drizzle falling, the crowd showed up in fleece jackets, gloves, wool caps and scarves, looking like they were headed for the ski slopes west of Denver.
Even Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero wore a ski cap beneath his catcher's helmet.
The groundsmen didn't even remove the tarp until an hour before the game. In between innings, they brought out bags of dry dirt to keep the infield from getting too slick. In the fifth, the crews poured a wheelbarrow full of dirt around home plate.
Holliday, with only two other hits in this series, neither of which left the infield, put Colorado ahead 1-0 in the first inning with a high drive. Left fielder Eric Byrnes crashed into the wall chasing the ball, much to the delight of the crowd.
Reynolds hit a 422-foot (129m) solo shot in the fourth to tie it 1-1, sending a first-pitch breaking ball from Fogg halfway up into the left-field seats to quiet the sellout crowd of 50,137.
After Fogg left, the Rockies turned to their trusty bullpen to wrap up their ninth straight win.
Jeremy Affeldt threw the seventh, Brian Fuentes the eighth and Manny Corpas the ninth for his fourth save of the playoffs.
The Diamondbacks, who have struggled all series to string together good at-bats, had their chances against Fogg early but hit into double plays in each of the first three innings.
The Rockies are trying for their first NL pennant in the franchise's 15-year history, and history appears solidly on their side.
Arizona must win four straight games against a Rockies team that is the first since the 1935 Chicago Cubs to win at least 20 of 21 games after Sept. 1, according to Elias Sports Bureau.
Colorado is the second team in NL history to open the postseason with six straight wins, joining the 1976 Cincinnati Reds, which went 7-0 in the playoffs, sweeping the Phillies and Yankees for the Big Red Machine's second straight title.
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