It seemed, at the time, like a useless acquisition. The Cubs signed Gary Gaetti, who had been released by the Cardinals, on his 40th birthday, August 19, 1998. Gaetti had hit decently for St. Louis -- .265/.339/.454 -- but appeared mostly done, and had had only one really good year (1995) in the previous ten.

Suddenly, those ten years melted away. In 37 games as a Cub in August and September 1998, Gaetti hit .320/.397/.594 with 8 HR in 128 AB. He even looked less statue-like at third base than he had for the past several seasons.

And on the night of September 28, he broke up a scoreless tie in the fifth inning with a home run after Henry Rodriguez had singled. Steve Trachsel still had a no-hitter going (despite six walks), although that was broken up in the 7th. For a while, it appeared the two runs would be all the Cubs would need to win the game and make the playoffs. In true Cub fashion, though, what appeared to be an easy 5-0 win into a nailbiter; the first four Giants reached base in the 9th inning and after a long fly ball by Barry Bonds put a scare into all of us who were there (it wound up caught for a sacrifice fly, making the score 5-3), Rod Beck was summoned to retire Jeff Kent and Joe Carter for the final two outs and the Cubs won what was at the time, the first winner-take-all game at Wrigley Field since Game 7 of the 1945 World Series.

The mistake then-GM Ed Lynch made was thinking that Gaetti (and the other oldsters who wheezed into the postseason with the 1998 Cubs) could do it again in 1999. Lynch kept most of that team together, and they played well for 1/3 of a season; after beating Arizona on June 8 they were 32-23 and a game out of first place. The next day, Lance Johnson got picked off first base to end the game, and that seemed to unravel the 1999 Cubs; they went 33-74 (yes, .308 ball, a 112-loss pace for a full season) the rest of the year. Gaetti hit .204/.260/.339 for the 1999 Cubs, and was released at season's end.

But for about five weeks, and especially in the 1998 tiebreaker game, Gary Gaetti was a Cub hero.

Sammy becomes the second player to have two entries on this list, after Kerry Wood. Hint: he won't be the last.

This home run, which tied game 1 of the NLCS with two out in the bottom of the ninth, I think made Wrigley Field as loud as I had ever heard it. And it may have been louder then than it was eight days later when Kerry Wood hit the HR in game 7.

The Cubs had blown a 4-0 first inning lead when Miguel Cabrera, Ivan Rodriguez and Juan Encarnacion all homered off Carlos Zambrano, taking a 5-4 lead in the third. The Marlins extended the lead to 6-4 in the sixth; Alex Gonzalez slammed a two-run HR to tie the game in the bottom of the inning. It stayed that way till the top of the 9th when the usually reliable Mark Grudzielanek made an error which helped lead to a two-run Marlins rally off Joe Borowski (one of the runs being unearned).

That set the stage for Sosa's heroics. If Grudzielanek hadn't made that error, Sosa's HR would have won the game, and this HR might rank even higher on this list.

If only.

Mike Lowell homered off Mark Guthrie leading off the 11th; that sucked all the air out of the ballpark in a game that wound up lasting three hours and forty-four minutes. Braden Looper finished off the Cubs in a 1-2-3 last of the 11th, but at the time, it didn't seem so bad. It was just game one of a seven-game series, after all.

Oh, well. No need to replay the rest of that series, right? You can watch video of this HR here.

Sosa actually hit two home runs on September 13, 1998 -- his 61st and 62nd of that season.

The one that's commemorated here is the 62nd -- for two reasons. First, because it briefly tied him with Mark McGwire for the major league lead (McGwire would retake that lead two days later against the Pirates), but also because the second of his two HR on that warm Sunday afternoon kept the Cubs in a ballgame that, at first, it seemed they'd win easily.

Sosa's 61st, hit in the fifth inning with Mark Grace on base, gave the Cubs an 8-3 lead over Milwaukee. But Steve Trachsel, Terry Mulholland, Matt Karchner, Felix Heredia, Don Wengert and Chris Haney (man, it hurt my fingers just to type those names) coughed up the lead and the Brewers entered the bottom of the 9th leading 10-8. Milwaukee smacked five HR off Cub pitching that day, including two by Jeff Cirillo, one from future Cub Jeromy Burnitz, and one by backup catcher Bobby Hughes, whose name I didn't even remember (he had about 300 AB for the Brewers in 1997 and 1998).

In the 9th, with one out, Sosa slammed an Eric Plunk pitch into a swarming scrum on Waveland Avenue -- I trust ballhawk will fill us in on the details. Henry Rodriguez doubled and Gary Gaetti singled in pinch runner Jason Maxwell (remember when people were debating whether Maxwell was a prospect or not? -- turned out he wasn't) and the game was tied.

I'm not going to get into the debate over the HR race and how, from our perspective ten years later (can it really be ten years?), it may be tainted by allegations of PED use. At the time, that HR was not only memorable, but meaningful, as it helped the Cubs stay in a game that, had they lost, would have dealt a blow to their wild-card playoff hopes.

On this mlb.com page, you can listen to the radio broadcast of that game -- if you have paid for MLB audio or you want to pay $2.95 for a "day pass". You'd think mlb.com would give away stuff like this as an enticement to subscribe, especially in the offseason, but no one's ever accused mlb.com of creative marketing practices.

As you may have guessed, this won't be the last time this particular game will appear on this list.

Wood is the first player to appear twice on this countdown.

And this HR is perhaps the saddest of all of them, because at the time it was hit, it gave us all such great hope, hope that was heightened an inning later when Moises Alou also homered (that one, I had almost forgotten).

Wood had been knocked around in the first inning when Juan Pierre led off with a triple, Ivan Rodriguez walked (I-Rod, who in general is hard to walk, set a career high in 2003 with 55 walks and drew five more in the NLCS), and Miguel Cabrera hit a three-run homer.

Down 3-0 in the third, the Cubs fought back. Eric Karros led off with a single off Mark Redman. Alex Gonzalez doubled, but Karros couldn't score. He did one out later on a Damian Miller groundout, which advanced Gonzalez to third. Wood teed off on a Redman pitch and sent everyone into a frenzy, both in the ballpark and in the streets, which were packed with thousands of people who couldn't even get into the ballpark, but just wanted to be in the vicinity to soak up the atmosphere. The game was tied.

Alou's HR in the next inning, after Sammy Sosa was hit by a pitch, gave the Cubs the lead, and gave us even more hope.

That hope was dashed in the fifth when the Marlins smacked Wood around and retook the lead.

I don't think there's any need to rehash the rest of the game, or the bad decisions Dusty Baker made with his bullpen (while Jack McKeon was using Brad Penny and Josh Beckett in relief). If you can stand it, here's the boxscore.

In all of Cubs history, they have played five winner-take-all games: the famous makeup of the Merkle game against the New York Giants on October 8, 1908 (the winner getting the NL pennant), game 7 of the 1945 World Series on October 10, 1945, game 5 of the 1984 NLCS on October 7, 1984, the wildcard tiebreaker vs. the Giants on September 28, 1998, and game 7 of the 2003 NLCS.

In all of those games, only five Cubs have hit HR: Jody Davis and Leon Durham (1984), Gary Gaetti (1998), and Wood and Alou (2003). That's not a very good record. Time to change that, this year -- and win the game, too (the Cubs are 2-3 in those games, winning in 1908 and 1998, losing the others).

Onward to victory in 2008. It's time.

I don't think I have to write too much about this one, because all of us remember it well. Aramis' walkoff completed a 6-5 comeback win over the Brewers, coming back from a 5-0 deficit in the first inning, and was probably the signature moment of the 2007 season.

Here's what I wrote about it at the time.

Courtesy of BCB reader John M, here's a diary that contains three broadcast calls of the HR -- Len Kasper's from TV, Pat & Ron from WGN radio, and Bob Uecker's from WTMJ in Milwaukee.

Those calls ought to warm you up on a snowy day in the Midwest.

This entry on the list is another that comes under the category of "meaningless, but memorable".

The 1987 Cubs were a pretty bad team -- after being in first place in May and staying close into early June, they quickly fell into fifth place and finished last in a mind-numbing drop-by-drop fall. There weren't any long losing streaks -- from July 1 to the end of the year the longest one was four -- but they couldn't get any winning streaks together, either; the longest winning streak of the entire year was five, done only once, in May. The boring Gene Michael was finally dumped as manager in early September, replaced by the even more boring Frank Lucchesi. The team did enter September over .500, but went 10-21 after September 1.

And so, about the only things worth watching that year were the pitching of Rick Sutcliffe, who won 18 games and should have won the Cy Young Award, and the hitting of Andre Dawson, who was named league MVP.

This MVP award has been controversial because the Cubs finished last and Dawson's peripheral stats -- apart from leading the league in HR, RBI and TB -- weren't that great (he scored only 90 runs despite hitting 49 HR). It wasn't even Dawson's best year -- his 1983 season with Montreal was quite a bit better.

But with the attitude he brought to the team, his solid defense in RF, and the HR he hit, he quickly became a fan favorite. Dawson himself said, of that season:

And on September 27, the last home game, a sunny Sunday, all wondered whether Dawson would give the fans one last memory. In his first four at-bats he had struck out, singled, singled and struck out. And then, he came up in the bottom of the 8th, with two out and the Cubs leading the Cardinals 6-3. Clearly, this would be his final appearance before the home crowd. It's easy to say now, 20+ years later, that we all knew he was going to hit one, but that was the feeling all of us in the ballpark had that day. Andre didn't disappoint. He ran the count to 3-1 against St. Louis reliever Bill Dawley, and then hit a ball far onto Waveland Avenue.

Meaningless? Sure. Memorable? You bet. The Cubs won the game 7-3, but Andre Dawson gave us enough memories to last a lifetime. He hit two HR on the Cubs' final road trip (in looking this up, I discovered that Lucchesi had batted Dawson second in the final two games, at Montreal, likely to try to get him some more AB), giving him 49 for the season, at the time, second-most in Cub history for a single season.

It was glorious, for two days.

The Cubs' first postseason date in thirty-nine years was beautiful and sunny, with light breezes and a temperature of 70 degrees, nice for early October. The Cubs were favored in the series against a team considered the "upstart", the Padres. Rick Sutcliffe, winner of 16 of his 20 starts since joining the Cubs from Cleveland at the old trading deadline date of June 15, took the mound against a Padre who three years later would enter Cub lore forever when he hit Andre Dawson in the face with a pitch, Eric Show.

The Cubs took to Show early and often. Dallas Green's Phillie acquisitions at the end of spring training, Bob Dernier and Gary Matthews, who had been key players in the drive to the division title, both homered in the first inning. Sutcliffe was mowing down Padres, meanwhile, and hadn't allowed a hit in the first three innings when he came up to bat to lead off the bottom of the third.

Sutcliffe was a decent hitter -- in 1984 he had hit .250/.276/.304 in 56 AB, with three doubles and six RBI. I was sitting in the RF bleachers, a few rows down from my usual spot (there were no bleacher season tickets in those days, so we scrambled to get whatever playoff tickets we could find; I got lucky to get into RF). Sutcliffe, a RHP who batted lefthanded, crushed a Show pitch that flew a few feet over our heads and wound up on Sheffield. He was the first Cub pitcher to homer in a postseason game. In fact, in the ten World Series (53 games) in which the Cubs appeared from 1906-1945, only twelve HR were hit by Cubs, only three of which were hit in games the Cubs won:

Not an awe-inspiring list, is it. And Joe Marty and Ken O'Dea aren't exactly memorable in Cub history (O'Dea was a backup catcher and Marty a spare-part outfielder).

The Cubs added two more HR that afternoon -- another by Matthews and one by Ron Cey, both off Greg Harris, and went on to win 13-0. It was, at the time, the largest shutout in postseason history; the Atlanta Braves beat this margin twice in one series, winning game 5 of the 1996 NLCS 14-0 and then winning game 7 of that same series 15-0.

But for one day, Sutcliffe and the Cubs tasted glory. Winning the next day 4-2, they figured to take the series easily. Let's stop there.

This one still gets talked about, eight years later. Glenallen Hill, in the second inning on May 11, 2000, against the Brewers, slammed a Steve Woodard pitch onto the roof of the building at the corner of Waveland and Kenmore. Woodard was a pretty bad pitcher -- he gave up a Ruschesque 26 HR in 147.2 IP in 2000, and didn't even finish the year with the Brewers (he was traded to Cleveland in July).

Still, that's pretty damn impressive. That building has been there almost as long as the ballpark, and that is, to my knowledge, the only time anyone has hit a ball that made the roof. (The building has a much larger seating structure on top of it today than it did in 2000.)

2000 was a pretty bad year in Cub annals. They lost 97 games, third-most in club history. They were already 9 games under .500 and 7.5 games out of first place on May 11. And look at the starting lineup they trotted out that day:

But the Hill HR is memorable. Had Hill been given a regular DH spot by some AL team early in his career, he might have hit 300+ HR. It's surprising the Blue Jays didn't try this -- they really didn't have a regular DH when Hill first came to the majors. He's now a coach for the Rockies.