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.