Rocking the World (Series)

By Kevin Baxter

Oct. 16, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

DENVER -- The Colorado Rockies are going to the World Series.

That’s neither a joke nor a misprint. Because after sweeping aside the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League Championship Series on Monday night, the once-hapless Rockies woke up this morning smelling of champagne as the last NL team standing.

For 15 years they’ve barely qualified as an afterthought, shoveling aside snow to play games that ended in football scores in their mile-high ballpark, finishing better than third in their five-team division only twice.

And now they’re National League champions.

In the last decade they’ve finished with a winning record only twice, losing more than 90 games two times in the last four seasons.

But now they’re four wins away from a World Series championship.

With Monday’s 6-4 victory in Game 4 of the NLCS, the Rockies capped an improbable monthlong run that saw them win 13 of their last 14 regular-season games, capture a one-game playoff to qualify for the postseason and then sweep all seven NL playoff games.

“This is what we grew up wanting to do,” winning pitcher Matt Herges said. “Playing in the backyard with your brother, this is what you dream about. And now we’re going to the World Series.”

Herges, who pitched two scoreless innings Monday, could be a poster boy for the Rockies’ rags-to-riches story. He has been cast off by six teams (including the Dodgers) in his major league career, and he was pitching in the minor leagues in July before the Rockies called him up.

“This is a special moment in the career of every man involved in this,” said Colorado Manager Clint Hurdle, whose team stood fourth in the NL West with 13 games to play. “This may never happen again. This is one of those things where you get everybody back 10, 20 years down the road and you have a reunion.”

It started with a 13-0 rout of the Florida Marlins on Sept. 16, followed by a doubleheader sweep of the Dodgers that was keyed by Todd Helton’s two-out, two-run walk-off homer against Takashi Saito.

The Rockies have lost only once since, going 21-1, the best streak by an NL team since the New York Giants won 22 of 23 games in 1936.

“We were wanting to finish strong,” infielder Jamey Carroll said. “And then we started to play the scenarios out. What if this and what if that? It finally came down to, ‘Hey, we just have to win tonight.’

“You gain that momentum and you gain that confidence and you gain that excitement and it just steamrolled from there.”

The Rockies steamrollered through a franchise-record 11-game winning streak. Steamrollered over San Diego’s Trevor Hoffman when they scored three 13th-inning runs against the most successful closer in history to win a one-game playoff and advance to the postseason. And then once there, steamrollered the Phillies and Diamondbacks to become the first team to sweep consecutive postseason series since the 1976 Cincinnati Reds.

“Is it surprising?” Hurdle asked. “Once the volume of it is picked up it’s been an incredible run. But all we’ve tried to do is put together a bunch of one-game winning streaks.”

And they’ve accomplished that with a rare blend of offense and pitching. Led by MVP candidate Matt Holliday, the league leader in batting and RBIs, the Rockies were the top hitting team in the league during the regular season. But they also had the league’s best pitching staff in the second half, and in the playoffs they’ve been particularly stingy, giving up less than two runs a game.

Monday they mixed in a few lucky bounces as well, using a pair of walks, an error and a two-strike pinch-hit double just inside the foul line to ignite a six-run rally in the fourth. Only two of the six runs were earned, but there was nothing cheap about the big blow -- Holliday’s 452-foot homer to dead center, his second in as many days, and one that clinched the series MVP award for him.

That not only chased Arizona starter Micah Owings -- who appeared to be injured earlier in the inning diving for Yorvit Torrealba’s weak grounder -- but it all but chased away the Diamondbacks’ hope of an unlikely comeback in a series in which they were thoroughly dominated.

The league’s winningest team during the regular season, the Diamondbacks scored only four runs against the Rockies’ starters in the NLCS and led for only two of 38 innings. And though Chris Snyder’s three-run homer against Brian Fuentes in the eighth inning Monday gave Arizona a final flicker of hope, that one swing produced almost as many runs as Arizona scored in the first three games of the series.

Closer Manny Corpas made sure the Diamondbacks got no closer, coming in to get the last four outs for his fifth postseason save.

“Teams that go to the World Series are teams that are playing the best at the end of the year,” Carroll said.

And this year in the NL, improbable as it sounds, that team is the Colorado Rockies.

kevin.baxter@latimes.com

Wild cards

The Colorado Rockies became the ninth wild-card team in 11 seasons to make it to the World Series. Four of those teams went on to win the Series.

2007--*Colorado (NL) vs. Boston or Cleveland

2006--St. Louis (NL) 4, *Detroit (AL) 1

2005--Chicago (AL) 4, *Houston (NL) 0

2004--*Boston (AL) 4, St. Louis (NL) 0

2003--*Florida (NL) 4, New York (AL) 2

2002--*ANGELS (AL) 4, *San Francisco (NL) 3