The Reds Are Now The Property Of Christian Yelich, Those Are The Rules

Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich hit for the cycle in a game against the Reds back on August 29. It was a career night for Yelich, who finished 6-for-6 from the plate with three RBI in a wacky Brewers win. Yelich hit three dingers and drove in nine runs in that three-game series, so the Reds were very happy to move on to the non-Yelich portion of their late-season schedule.

But Monday night was the start of another series between the Brewers and Reds, and Yelich used it as an occasion to do what no other player in MLB history had ever done before: he hit for a cycle for the second time in one season against the same team.

This time Yelich did it in four at-bats, and in time to be substituted out in the eighth inning. And like all the best ones, this cycle ended with a triple, by far the rarest and hardest part of any cycle. Baseball has been around for a very long time, and there have only been 322 cycles in its recorded history, and Yelich has now hit the last two of them. This is arbitrary but fun: Aaron Hill in 2012 is the last player whose name appears consecutively on this big list of cycles, when he hit two in 11 days as a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Prior to that you have to go all the way back to John Reilly, who hit the third and fourth cycles in baseball history in a seven-day period back in 1883, to find another player who hit a second cycle before anyone else in baseball hit one.

At any rate, unfortunately for Bob Castellini, the Cincinnati Reds now belong to Christian Yelich. He may do with them what he will.