October 16, 2001	Tuesday	Rajab 28, 1422

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PHOENIX (Arizona), Oct 15: Tony Wommack went from goat to hero in the span of a few seconds in the ninth inning.

As a result, the Arizona Diamondbacks are going to their first National League Championship in only their fourth Major League Baseball season.

Wommack’s dramatic two-out, two-strike single to left field scored Danny Batista from second base with the winning run as the Diamondbacks beat St Louis 2-1 to capture their best-of-five first-round series in game five.

The victory sends Arizona into the best-of-seven league finals against Atlanta for a World Series berth. The National League finals start here Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Atlanta-Arizona winner will face the American League champion in the World Series, but it will take a pair of fifth-game showdowns Monday to determine which clubs advance to the AL finals.

Seattle, which won a record-tying 116 regular-season games, forced a fifth game at home by winning 6-2 at Cleveland and the three-time defending champion New York Yankees did the same by romping 9-2 at Oakland.

In Cleveland, the visiting Mariners scored three runs in the seventh inning off Indians ace Bartolo Colon, who had blanked Seattle for 14 prior innings, a league division series record.

The start was delayed two hours and 20 minutes by rain. Through six innings, the only run to cross the plate came on Juan Gonzalez’s second-inning homer that gave the Indians a 1-0 lead.

But Seattle struck in the seventh when David Bell, son of a long-time Cleveland player, slapped a sacrifice fly out to left field that allowed Stan Javier to tag up and score from third base to level that game 1-1.

League batting champion Ichiro Suzuki from Japan followed with a single to rightfield that scored Mike Cameron from second base and put the Mariners ahead to stay. Mark McLemore followed with a single to score Al Martin from third and lift the Seattle lead to 3-1.

In Oakland, the Yankees bounced back and will try to become the first club to lose the first two games of a best-of-five series on their home field and rally to advance.

The Yankees beat the A’s in a fifth-game in last year’s opening round and that was in Oakland, where the A’s blew two chances to advance.

Cuban defector Orlando Hernandez, who endured an injury-plagued regular season, improved to 9-1 lifetime in the major league playoffs. The righthander allowed two runs in 5 2/3 innings.

Bernie Williams was just 1-for-11 in the first three games, but responded with a two-run double in the third, a two-run single in the fourth and a run-scoring double in the eighth.

Sunday’s divisional playoff results (home team in CAPS):