Non-Cycle Games With A Double, Triple, and Two Homers

Last night, Carlos Beltran

did something rather rare: he fell a single short of the cycle while also hitting two home runs. He became just the 19th player since 1918 to do so.

Here’s the full list of players with a 2B / 3B / 2 HR game but no singles. As you might expect, there are quite a few excellent hitters:

As you can see, this feat has become somewhat more common since the home run explosion of the 1990s, with over half of the list occurring since 1994. Before ’94, there was a 30+ year gap; there was also a 17-year gap in the 1940s and ’50s.

There are 5 Hall of Famers on the list, and several of them are inner-circle types like Hank Aaron

, Jimmie Foxx , and Lou Gehrig . In addition, there are a bunch of great-hitting non-HOFers like Larry Walker , Gary Sheffield , Roger Maris , and some of the active players like Beltran and Ryan Howard .

There are some surprises, however. Most notably, the following 4 players:

• Roger Cedeno
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  : 36 career triples, 40 career HRs
• Chris Richard
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  : 6 career triples, 34 career HRs
• Rich Becker
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  : 12 career triples, 45 career HRs
• Ben Paschal
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  : 11 career triples, 24 career HRs

Games like that are part of the reason I love baseball. Sure, Cedeño had no power and Richard had no speed. But they both somehow had a 2B/3B/2 HR game within a year of each other.

By the way, there have also been 5 games in which a player has missed the cycle but had a 2B, a HR, and 2 triples:

Unsurprisingly, given the historical dropoff in triples, his hasn’t been done since 1973.

There have also been 24 games in which the player has had 2 doubles, a triple, and a homer, but failed to get that single for the cycle:

The Legend of Sam Fuld

isn’t burning too brightly at the moment, but he’ll always have April 11th, 2011 to remember fondly. He has some actually legendary company on that list, including Willie Stargell , Al Kaline , and Ty Cobb .