Rockies keep razing Arizona

DENVER -- Tony Clark, protected from a bone-numbing chill by a cotton pullover, looked out at the slate-gray skies over Coors Field late Sunday afternoon and feigned indifference to the weather.

“What elements?” the Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman said. “We knew coming in it was going to be chilly. We knew there was going to be a possibility of rain.”

But the Fogg, apparently, caught them by surprise. Because for six innings Sunday, Colorado’s Josh Fogg kept the frustrated Diamondbacks’ bats on ice. And that, combined with a sixth-inning home run from catcher Yorvit Torrealba carried the surprising Rockies to a 4-1 win in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, moving them a giant step closer to the first World Series berth in the franchise’s 15-year history.

“This is why we play the game. This is why we’re here,” said Fogg, the oldest member of a Colorado rotation that has held Arizona to four runs in three games. “A lot of people didn’t believe that we would get here, but if you ask the 25 guys in this locker room, I bet you everybody says that they never doubted it for a second.”

And now all that stands between the Rockies and the first NLCS sweep in 12 years is rookie right-hander Micah Owings, an eight-game winner who was pitching in an instructional league game last week, his only outing in nearly three weeks.

“We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” said slugger Matt Holliday, who got the Rockies started Sunday with a first-inning homer. “Arizona’s a great team, and they’re here for a reason. It’s going to be hard to close them out because, like us, they’ve overcome a lot of odds to get here and they’re not willing to roll over.”

Nor, clearly, are the red-hot Rockies, who have won 20 of their last 21 games, including six in a row in the postseason. The Diamondbacks, meanwhile, are in an 0-3 hole, a deficit only one team -- the 2004 Boston Red Sox -- has managed to overcome.

“It’s one win at a time,” Arizona Manager Bob Melvin said. “We can’t win four at once. We just have to get one on the board first. So that’s all it will be about tomorrow.”

They had plenty of chances to do that Sunday since Fogg, who improved to 7-1 all-time against Arizona, was on the ropes all night long. He allowed at least one man to reach base in every inning, but with the exception of Mark Reynolds’ two-out homer in the fourth, he kept the Diamondbacks off the scoreboard. That’s because Arizona again failed to deliver in the clutch, hitting into double plays in each of the first three innings and going hitless with runners in scoring position, dropping their series average to a chilly .118 with RISP.

Yet for 5 2/3 innings, Arizona starter Livan Hernandez kept the game even, using an array of off-speed pitches to limit the Rockies to Holliday’s homer. But Colorado finally broke through in the sixth on a walk to Todd Helton, Brad Hawpe’s soft single to right field and Torrealba’s two-out, two-strike drive through a misting rain.

The homer, on a full-count fastball, came at the end of a prolonged game of cat and mouse between the Rockies’ catcher and the pitcher he once caught in San Francisco, with Torrealba repeatedly stepping out of the batter’s box and Hernandez continually backing off the mound.

And when the two finally got ready at the same time, Hernandez found another way to keep Torrealba off-balance, throwing him a 60-mph curveball.

“To be honest with you, it just made me laugh,” said the catcher, who managed to stay alive by fouling off the full-count pitch.

The next pitch brought a smile to most in the sellout crowd of 50,137 when Torrealba lined it into the left-field stands. And when he did, the Rockies, in fourth place in the NL West and only four games above .500 a month ago, were that much closer to a World Series.

“It’s been a long way,” Torrealba said. “In spring training you work and you get ready for the season. And in the season you want to be in the playoffs and in the playoffs you want to be in the World Series.

“For us, it’s just one more day.”

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kevin.baxter@latimes.com