At the time he wrote, Byrd had 13 RBIs, 11 of them with two outs. At the time I wrote, he had 15 RBIs, 12 of them with two outs. There certainly must have been some magic going on there, right?

Like I said last month, no. Byrd’s prodigious two-out RBI total was just statistical noise. He’d flipped five coins, gotten tails four times, then tried to explain what made him so good at flipping tails. It was silly.

It’s nothing, of course, for some ballplayer to misinterpret his own numbers, especially since doing so might help him on the field. If Marlon Byrd believes in his heart that he has magical two-out RBI skills, the confidence might help him do a little better in that situation. Who knows. Or cares. It’s fun to have ballplayers writing blogs.

What’s annoying is when, for want of a better term, the media, the people who are supposed to describe and analyze the game for us, lazily fall into this kind of silly thinking, which happens approximately most of the time. As detailed in my post last month, my fascination with the two-out RBI was sparked years ago by ESPN lazily flashing a team two-out RBI statistic to further a story line that the then-Anaheim Angels were scrappy.

Byrd now has 27 RBIs, 13 of them with two outs. So since my post, he’s driven in 12 runs, and one of them has come with two outs.

What’s going on here? Gosh, I wish I knew, but oddly, Byrd has not posted anything to try to explain his sudden inability to drive in runs with two outs!

Marlon Byrd http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The talk sounded like hooey to me, and after digging into the numbers a very little, I discovered that hooey was praising with faint damnation. All the original, context-free graphic, the one that sent analyst Buck Martinez into paroxysms of praise for their scrappiness, had said was that the Angels that year were scoring 40 percent of their runs with two outs.

It turned out that 40 percent wasn’t much above league average or much better than the percentage of the team in the other dugout that day, the Chicago White Sox, who had been about a .500 team for a few years and were a year away from being thought of as scrappy.

I also found out that the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins, who were both leading their divisions, didn’t score many runs with two outs, percentage-wise, and the Kansas City Royals, who were last in the league, did.

Since then, whenever I’ve bothered to check on someone’s claims that some player or team is great at scoring with two outs, that claim has turned out to be hooey. It’s usually an anecdotal observation — the Monsters have scored five of their six runs tonight with two outs! — or a product of the fact that more than a third of all runs score with two outs, so most teams look pretty good as two-out run scorers if you think that the average team ought to score 33.3 percent of their runs with two outs.

League averages are pretty constant. It varies by a percent or two from year to year, but you can count on teams scoring about 23 percent of their runs with no outs, 39 percent with one out and 38 percent with two outs.

So Marlon Byrd of the Chicago Cubs has a blog on MLBlogs.com, and the other day he addressed his own extra special goodness at driving in runs with two outs. This is probably because, at the time he wrote the post, Byrd had 13 RBIs, and 11 of them had come with two down. That’s 85 percent! He now has 15 RBIs, 12 with two outs.

I have no clue why I have so many two-out RBI. Ron Washington pointed it out to me last year. He told me that with two outs, I drive in more runs than I do with less than two outs. He was trying to figure out what my approach was. I said, I’m just trying to bring them in, bottom line. I don’t know. When you see a guy out there, you have to try to keep your focus and try not to do too much and not change anything as far as trying to put the ball in play. I try to relax a little more and just touch the ball — I learned that from Bobby Abreu. He’s unbelievable driving guys in. Just hit it where it’s pitched and sort of flick at the ball and let it hit your bat instead of really trying to drive the ball into the gap.

I don’t think about the pitcher at all, not one bit. I try to stick to my game plan and try to keep it simple and clear my head as much as possible. The more you start thinking, the more you forget about the ball. I just try to see the ball and put it in a good spot and not try to do too much.

Now, before I go any farther, let me just say two things. One is that I like Marlon Byrd. I like how he pulled his career out of the scrap heap when he got to Texas after three terrible years in Philadelphia and Washington. I know his big numbers over the last three years were a product of the ballpark in Texas, but even on the road he was better than he’d been in his Lost Period.

Also, he plays on my Scoresheet team, the Lionhearts, so he’s my guy now. He’s put up a .524/.545/.714 line in limited action as a reserve.

The other thing I want to say is that that excerpt is pretty interesting. Big-picture analysis by current players is usually not compelling in the least, but when you get them talking about how they actually approach their jobs, what they’re thinking, you’ve got something, because these guys are the absolute best in the world at what they do. When they talk about it, you might want to listen.

Byrd doesn’t say anything groundbreaking here. Focus, don’t try to do too much, etc. But it’s interesting to me that when Byrd — or Bobby Abreu, we learn — is up there with two outs and runners in scoring position, he’s trying to “touch the ball,” not “drive the ball into the gap.” I didn’t know that.

That said, I couldn’t help myself. I fact-checked him.

Last year, Marlon Byrd got 39 percent of his RBIs with two outs and 44 percent with 1 out. That’s an odd definition of driving in more runs with two outs than with less than two outs — 61 percent with less than two outs — though maybe Washington, his manager at the time, spoke to him at some early point in the season when it was true.

Remember the usual league average is usually 38 percent with two outs, 39 percent with 1 out, and that’s what it was last year, so Byrd does not seem to be some kind of outlier as a two-out RBI guy. In 2008 he got 23 percent of his RBIs with two outs and 45 percent with one out. Where he really stood out was by getting 32 percent of them with no outs. In 2007, his first year in Texas, Byrd got 40 percent of his RBIs with two outs, 37 percent with one out and 23 percent with no outs, almost exactly league average.

This year, as noted, Byrd has 15 RBIs, 12 of them with two outs. Dumb luck and small sample sizes don’t make for good blog posts, I guess. It must be his extra special two-out voodoo powers. And of course at the end of the year Byrd will still have 80 percent of his RBIs with two outs. Because he’s extra special good that way.

He can do it now, in a beginner’s sort of way, and he likes practicing. He’s been bugging me a lot to play catch lately. He even wanted to stick around at the park after a practice the other night so he and I could throw the ball around a little. I asked him if that was because he wanted to practice and he said, “Yeah, and also because it’s fun.”

It is fun. I’d forgotten that. It’s been coming back to me as we toss the ball back and forth, usually from only 40 feet or so. I just love playing catch. I always have.

I haven’t done it much over the years. Warming up before softball games, mostly, which I also haven’t done much lately. But even that’s not quite what I mean by playing catch. Throwing the ball before a game serves a purpose. It’s a warmup exercise. It’s fun, but the best way to play catch is to play catch just to play catch.

Great stuffed pillows of prose have been written about games of catch, about fathers and sons and green pastures of spring and all that baloney. I don’t have much use for this kind of thing. Grass gets plenty green without baseball, you know, and fathers and sons who can only talk to each other by playing catch have problems that won’t be solved by playing catch.

As much as I love to play catch, I’ve never really felt that some great mystical communication was going on when I was playing with a friend, or with my dad. It’s fun to play catch with someone I hardly know too. I love the rhythm of it. The simplicity. I love the sound, the pop of the glove when there’s a little mustard on the throw and it’s caught square in the pocket. Catch is a little hypnotizing. It ought to be the most boring thing in the world, but I’ve never ended a game out of boredom. I’ve worn out my arm a few times, though.

I love playing catch with my son not because some magical, wordless discourse travels between us but because I love playing catch and I love that he enjoys playing it with me.

I have to be careful not to fall into the familiar patterns of a game of catch because he’s not ready for that yet. Wherever I’ve played catch and whoever I’ve played it with, at whatever age, catch has always been the same. It starts with simple tossing, a few backward steps every couple of throws to increase the distance. After a while, one or the other will spin a little curveball and invariably get one in return.

Then another curve, or maybe an amateurish split-finger or knuckleball. A screwball for those so inclined, with a question right behind it: “Did that do anything?” Those big-leaguers make a lot of money for a reason. The usual answer: “Not really.”

Soon, one will start winding up, maybe just a little at first, a leg kick. Then an imitation of some famous pitching motion. In my childhood it would have been Juan Marichal’s high leg kick or Luis Tiant’s full turn toward center field, though the windup that comes easiest to me is the rather nondescript one of the pitcher who was a hometown constant through my mid-teens, Don Sutton. It’s a rocking motion with a fluid kick, almost a swing toward home plate. Never mind. I’ll show you sometime.

I wonder if kids still do that as much. Pitchers’ windups seem more uniform now, not as idiosyncratic as they used to be. I think I’ll know the answer to this question within a year or two.

But no, not yet. I have to catch myself before letting loose my favorite pitch, my straight knuckler. No circle changes or palm balls. No dropping down sidearm. I’ve always wanted to invent a pitch, be the guy who figures out a way to configure those five fingers in some way that nobody’s thought of before. This will have to wait.

My son has become reasonably competent at catching balls thrown directly to him. He has trouble on his backhand side and tends not to reach quite high enough for balls higher than eye level. He’ll get there.

For now I concentrate on my mechanics, repeating my motion. I aim a straight, medium-speed ball at his left shoulder on every toss. It would be too easy for him if I could hit the target more consistently, but my shortcomings in this area give him plenty of practice reacting to different kinds of throws.

Each throw is just a throw. It doesn’t carry a message. I send those over with words. “Good!” Or “Whoops, sorry, bad throw!” I’ll tell him to turn the glove over when he forgets to backhand a ball to his right and he’ll tell me about something someone did at the last game. He’ll vow to catch the next 10. I’ll concentrate on laying that ball right on his shoulder so he can do it. He hardly ever does it. Not yet.

These games of catch might be formative moments that my son will take to his grave. I get that. They also might be forgotten and baseball abandoned by winter. I hope I’ll get to keep reprising them until long after my son — and, soon, I hope, my daughter — has had to start holding himself back to make allowances for my age.

But if not, then not. I’ll miss that familiar-again rhythm, that pop of the glove, that little flip to the bare hand, that back and forth. But I’ve missed it before. And whichever way it goes, if my kid and I need to talk to each other, we won’t go out and play catch. We’ll talk.

Then, maybe, if it’s light out and not raining, we’ll play catch. I hope so, because I love to play catch.

I wrote about Neifi Pérez, who infuriated fans of the Kansas City Royals, San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers in a long career that started with the Colorado Rockies, for whom he put up ballpark-aided, deceptively half-decent offensive numbers, and ended with his suspension for using amphetamines.

The piece is not sarcastic. I really did come to admire Neifi Pérez.

To be a guy like that, to be a guy who makes fans in four cities tear their hair out, to be possibly the single worst regular player in the major leagues in multiple seasons, to last for a dozen years in the big leagues, start more than 1,200 games, get caught stealing an astonishing 45 times in 102 attempts, you have to be a hell of a ballplayer.

The worst player in the major leagues is a hell of a ballplayer. The worst player in the history of the major leagues, whoever he was, was a hell of a ballplayer. Neifi Pérez was a hell of a ballplayer.

The chapter was excerpted this week by my employer, Salon.com, and many former readers of my old sports column showed up in the comments to say kind things about being glad to see my byline and wishing I would bring the column back. I would if it were up to me, but Salon is a business and it makes business decisions, and that’s about it for now.

Part of my job these days is to improve the headlines and coverlines of the pieces that run in Salon, and I did that to my own piece. Well, I changed the headline. I’m not sure I improved it. I forget what it was originally but I changed it to “Neifi Pérez: Bad baseball Hall of Famer.”

I’m gratified to say that this phrase, “bad baseball Hall of Famer,” inspired Joe Posnanski, whom I admire quite a bit, to call on his blog for the formation of a Bad Baseball Hall of Fame. He asks for nominations. Go on over and nominate someone, but be warned, Johnnie LeMaster has already been nominated. A lot.

And while you’re clicking around, why not go buy the book? Here’s that Amazon link again.

Funny thing about having the chapter excerpted in Salon: The readers quickly spotted an error that both I and the book’s excellent editor, Sean Manning, had missed in our multiple, in my case dozens of, readings of the piece. Here it is: “[Dusty] Baker and Detroit’s Jim Leyland have their critics, but they’ve each won more than 1,000 games and three division titles. Baker has won a pennant, Leyland two pennants and a World Series — the latter with Neifi on the postseason roster.”

Of course, Leyland’s World Series win came in 1997 with the Florida Marlins, not in 2006 with the Detroit Tigers and their ineffectual utility man, Neifi Pérez. Not sure how I got myself turned around in that sentence, but there it is, captured for posterity, a mistake I must have read right over 50 times without catching.

I always said my readers at Salon were the best editor in the world. There they go again.

Did I mention you can buy the book? I don’t get royalties or anything. But it’d be nice if a book I contributed to sold a few copies. And it’s good too, a fun read. Roger Kahn’s piece on Jackie Robinson is almost worth the cover price alone for the way it portrays Robinson, whom Kahn both covered and worked for, as a real person, not the paper saint we’ve come to know in the last 20 years.

I’ve read about 15 of the 25 chapters, and there’s not a dog in the bunch yet. Even my old pal Buzz Bissinger’s piece on Albert Pujols isn’t bad.

“Indians won 111, Yankees 103 and the White Sox 94 … the same total as their ‘59 pennant winners but 17 behind in ‘54. Then it was about a 25-game drop to the other five,” he wrote.

Exactly 25 games, in fact, to the 69-win Boston Red Sox, who finished 42 games out.

I responded that it was a good question, and if I were ever laid up with a broken leg or something I’d research it. Well, I overestimated how difficult it would be to research that question, which means I underestimated the usefulness of Baseball-Reference.com, which at this point in history there’s no excuse for doing.

So I looked into it. Now, I don’t know how to define the most top-heavy league, but let’s use Jack’s rough definition, the best combined record of the top three teams. The ‘54 Indians, Yankees and White Sox combined to go 308-154, which for the mathematically sharp-eyed among you is easy to spot as a .667 winning percentage.

According to my research — a word about the research: I was sober and reasonably careful, but let’s not go betting the house on the results, OK? — those 308 wins were the most by any three teams in one league in one year between 1901 and 1968, which covers the so-called modern period before the advent of divisions. Even when the schedule expanded from 154 games to 162, in 1961 in the American League and ‘62 in the National, no three teams ever combined to win 308 games.

Dividing the league into divisions, which happened in 1969, presented a different enough picture that I didn’t include that period in this survey. I mean, if one team in each of the West, Central and East combined to win 315 games, it wouldn’t feel like a top-heavy league. It would just feel like a series of one-sided division races.

But while 308 wins was the most by any trio, by winning percentage, the 1954 A.L. was only the third most top-heavy league in the period. The most top-heavy by that reckoning was the 1909 National League. The top three teams that year were Pittsburgh, with 110 wins, the Cubs with 104 and the New York Giants with 92. That’s only 306 wins, but for some reason the league schedule was only 153 games that year, not 154. And the Pirates had a rained out game they never made up. So the overall record of those three teams was 306-152, a winning percentage of .668.

The drop from the third-place Giants to the fourth-place Cincinnati Reds was only 15 games. The lopsidedness wasn’t spread as evenly as it would be in the 1954 A.L. The bottom three teams, Brooklyn, St. Louis and Boston, lost 98, 98 and 108 games respectively.

The top three in the N.L. in 1906 also had a better combined winning percentage than the ‘54 A.L.’s top three — barely. But that’s a little misleading — a little like saying that King Kelly and I are the highest-scoring pair of guys named King in history with a combined 1,357 runs.

There was nothing special about the second- and third-place teams that year. The Giants won 96 games and the Pirates 93. But the Cubs were the winningest regular-season team ever, going an astounding 116-36, the only major league team to ever win three-fourths of its games. They won the league by 20 games — over a team that won 96.

Anyway, the combined 305 wins in, again, a 153-game schedule, with both the Cubs and Giants having one unplayed game, meant an overall record of 305-152, a winning percentage of .667. But that was better than 1954, because it was .6673, while the ‘54 A.L. teams combined to go .6666.

So, by this measure anyway, the combined winning percentage of the top three teams, the 1954 American League was the third most top-heavy league in history, behind only the 1909 and 1906 National League. It was certainly the most top-heavy that anyone now living can remember. But if you measured it a different way — say, the distance between third place and fourth — you’d get a different answer.

By the way, the best third-place team I found in my little survey — and it only might be the best I noticed, not the actual best — was the 1962 Reds, who won 98 games but trailed both the Giants and Dodgers. They both won 101, then the Giants won two of three in a playoff.

Meanwhile, my ‘54 Yankees just lost two out of three to the ‘25 Washington Senators. We’re 7-5, one game behind the 2008 Red Sox. Next up, three at the 1977 Kansas City Royals, then back home to the Bronx for a four-game weekend set — we’re up to the last weekend of April — against the 2007 Cleveland Indians.

And clearly the definition of celebrity is being stretched here.

I was invited by Jonah Keri to play in the Seamheads Near Miss League, which uses Out of the Park Baseball to simulate a season for a circuit made up of good teams that did not win the World Series. I chose the 1954 New York Yankees, ignoring my distaste for all things Yankee partly because I misunderstood the initial description, thinking the league would be made up only of second-place teams, and second-place teams don’t come any better than the ‘54 Yanks, who went 103-51.

The 1993 San Francisco Giants went 103-59, but I witnessed that. I figured the ‘54 Yankees would be a little more interesting and educational for me. I also just finished reading Allen Barra’s Yogi Berra bio, which of course covered 1954.

The league is run by Mike Lynch of Seamheads.com, whose first celebrity league was the Seamheads Historical League, in which owners built a team using all of the players who ever played for a franchise. Joe Posnanski’s Cleveland Indians won it, winning the World Series over the Boston Red Sox when Tris Speaker threw out Reggie Smith trying to go from first to third on a single by Jimmie Foxx.

I’m pretty sure that precise play never happened in real life.

Here’s the owner’s directory so you can see the other big celebs involved.

I don’t really understand Out of the Park Baseball, though it looks pretty cool and if I had a spare few hours every night I could see really getting involved with it. What I did was set my lineups and pitching rotation and send them to Lynch, with a few very broad strategy instructions — no one runs but Mantle, no one bunts but Rizzuto — and sat back to wait for the results.

Filling out a lineup card for the 1954 Yankees isn’t too difficult. There aren’t that many choices. Berra’s going to catch, you know? This league isn’t using playing-time constraints, so I get a break there and I get to use Bill Skowron as my regular first baseman. In real life Skowron, a rookie that year, platooned with Joe Collins, starting 56 games at first while Collins started 75. But Collins hit .271/.365/.446 in 398 plate appearances while Skowron hit .340/.392/.577 in 237 PAs. The Moose it is.

Also, we’re using the designated hitter rule in the American League, so while in real life Casey Stengel used Hank Bauer, Gene Woodling and Irv Noren as a three-way platoon in left and right field, I get to use all three. Though in another playing-time trick, I’ve got the left-handed Noren sitting against lefties, replaced by … the left-handed Enos Slaughter!

We’ll see how that goes, but in real life Slaughter, who played in 69 games that year at the age of 38, had a crazy reverse platoon split, putting up a .700 OPS against righties and an .814 against lefties.

How it’s going so far is the Yankees are 6-3, on a five-game winning streak and tied for first in the A.L. East with Bill Simmons’ 2008 Boston Red Sox. Doesn’t seem like a fair fight to me. Bill’s guys are young and fit, plus David Ortiz, and mine are in their 80s, or dead.

Also in the division: Milo Kaminsky’s 1969 Baltimore Orioles, Jack Perconte’s 2007 Cleveland Indians, Gary Gillette’s 1961 Detroit Tigers, Jason Bova’s 1985 Toronto Blue Jays and Joe Dimino’s 1925 Washington Senators.

The Yanks got off to a rough start, losing two in a row before salvaging the third game against Joe Hamrahi and Craig Brown’s 1977 Kansas City Royals. Then they got pounded by the Senators 11-1 to fall to 1-3 before Eddie Lopat threw a shutout to launch New York on its winning streak, two wins over the Senators and a three-game road sweep over Perconte’s ‘07 Indians.

Take that, former big-leaguer, who by the way has been blogging entertainingly at Seamheads about his career.

Next up, we go to Washington, Whitey Ford, still looking for his first win, against Tom Zachary in the opener.

Using Skowron over Collins is really paying off so far. Skowron’s 7-for-31 with no extra-base hits and a .520 OPS. Collins is 6-for-14 with a triple and a 1.071 OPS. Small sample size, but there might be some good reason why playing Skowron over Collins won’t work. Slaughter, by the way, is 4-for-15.

According to Baseball Almanac, my highest-paid player is Mickey Mantle, who made $21,000 that year. In today’s money, that’s $166,470. It’s good to be an owner.

And yes, I am interested in who the 105th best prospect in baseball is, aren’t you?

Outman, 24, who has about the best name for a pitcher since Barney Strikeout back in the ’20s, came over from Philadelphia in the Joe Blanton trade. He’s not just a prospect, he’s a rookie. He had a cup of coffee last year and made the A’s rotation out of spring training. After two poor starts he’s in the bullpen.

So far in two starts and two relief outings he has an ERA of 5.23, with 11 strikeouts and six walks in 10 and a third innings. He has a mid-90s fastball and an arsenal of breaking balls, but control has been a problem.

Inman, 22, is a little guy — for a pitcher, that is; he’s 6-foot, 200 pounds — who has dominated in the minors, striking out well over a batter per inning with a better-than 3-1 strikeout to walk ratio. But his size and unorthodox pitching motion have led scouts to discount the results. Here’s ESPN’s Keith Law after watching Inman pitch in the Futures Game last year:

Will Inman’s delivery drew a lot of laughs in the scouts’ section — he looks like he’s “doing the pigeon,” for you old-school “Sesame Street” fans — and he throws severely across his body with a fringe-average fastball and a big, slow-roller curveball. He’d have a hard time being a fifth starter in most parks, although Petco Park might make him a No. 3.

Inman was pretty good at Double-A with San Antonio last year, posting a 3.52 ERA in 28 starts with 140 strikeouts in 135 and a third innings, but he also walked 71, which is too many. He’s back at San Antonio, and he’s off to a rough beginning. In three starts, he’s 0-1 with a 6.23 ERA. His walks are under control, with only two in 13 innings, but so are his strikeouts — only 10 so far.

Inman vs. Outman. In vs. Out. Which is better? It’s almost like a parallel to the debate about whether bloggers (OUTsiders) or reporters (INsiders) are more effective at covering a subject, isn’t it?

No. No, it isn’t. Not even a little. That’s just stupid. But I’m going to follow Inman vs. Outman anyway.

I don’t care if it’s true. I love it.

“Although the field dimensions of the new stadium are exactly that of the old stadium,” Gina Cherundolo writes, “the shell of the new stadium is shaped differently. AccuWeather.com meteorologists also estimate that the angle of the seating in the new stadium could have an effect on wind speed across the field.”

Cherundolo goes on to note that the old ballpark had more stacked tiers and a big upper deck, which acted like a big wind baffle. The wind came over the top and dropped into the bowl, where it swirled.

But: “The new Yankee Stadium’s tiers are less stacked, making a less sharp slope from the top of the stadium to the field.” This, she writes, might allow the wind to come over the top of the grandstand and follow the gentle downslope of the seating. Then, depending on the direction of the wind, it would rise back up as it approaches the outfield seats.

And why, class, does the new Yankee Stadium’s grandstand slope at a gentler angle — that is, make the upper deck farther away from the field — than in the old Yankee Stadium?

Without having looked at the plans for the new park in a while, I can answer and so can you. It’s the same answer for every new stadium. The grandstand is shaped that way to make room for luxury boxes.

Take that, free-spending Yankees! I don’t mean on the billion-dollar stadium. The taxpayers mostly paid for that. I mean all that pitching you spent about a quarter of a billion on this offseason. You went and built Coors Field circa 1995 for them!

It only works when the wind’s blowing a certain way, at a certain strength, which it is now, and which Accuweather.com says will happen again in the fall, when the Yankees are watching the World Series. That is, if the meteorologists’ speculation is correct.

But we Yankee haters will take it. It’s the House That Oops Built.

Rob and I came dangerously close to drafting Radhames Liz in BPKings Scoresheet league. After giving up six runs in a third of an inning today, Liz is now rocking a 67.50 ERA. The most amazing thing about that stat is that we didn’t draft him.

Three players hitting for the cycle in five days. I couldn’t remember such a thing happening before. Hitting for the cycle isn’t vanishingly rare, like throwing a perfect game, but it’s an unusual event. It only happens a few times a year in the big leagues.

I decided to try to find out if three in five days had ever happened before. It didn’t take long for me to find Retrosheet’s List of cycles and I opened it, prepared to squint happily at it for hours trying to find another crazy five-day period in which three players had collected each of baseball’s four hits in one game.

How far back would I have to go? What names would I be able to pull out of the colorful past if such a thing had ever happened? I started at the bottom of the chronological list, began scanning up and —

It happened at the end of last year. In baseball terms, it happened last month. Cristian Guzman of the Washington Nationals hit for the cycle on Aug. 28, followed by Stephen Drew of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Adrian Beltre of the Seattle Mariners both doing it four days later, on Sept. 1. This set of circumstances was so monumentally fascinating that I’d completely forgotten it. I’m not even sure I’d been aware of it at the time.

Mark Kotsay of the Atlanta Braves had hit for the cycle two weeks before Guzman. So that was four in 19 days, something for this year’s big leaguers to shoot for.

That was kind of an anticlimax.

But I’d come this far, loaded the Web page and everything, so I decided to look for the last time three cycles had been hit in five days before last year. Because I figured that would be just as exciting as the Guzman-Drew-Beltre trifecta that had so thrilled me back in ‘08, or would have if I’d noticed it.

It almost happened in July 1970. Tony Horton of the Baltimore Orioles hit for the cycle on July 2, then Tommie Agee of the New York Mets did it on July 6 and Jim Ray Hart of the San Francisco Giants on July 8. A seven-day stretch.

In August 1933 four players did it in 16 days, and the first three of them were Philadelphia A’s. Mickey Cochrane did it on the second, Pinky Higgins on the sixth and Jimmie Foxx on the 14th. Earl Averill of the Cleveland Indians added a cycle on the 17th. Big month for the cycle, but no three of them were within five days of each other.

There were three cycles in an eight-day period in 1887, the first and third by the same guy, Tip O’Neill of the American Association St. Louis Browns, who are now the National League St. Louis Cardinals. He did it on April 30 and May 7. In between, Fred Carroll of the N.L. Pittsburgh Alleghenys — soon to be renamed the Pirates — cycled on May 2.

The only other three cycles in five days episode I found happened in June 1885. Dave Orr of the American Association New York Metropolitans did it on the 12th, followed by George Wood of the N.L. Detroit Wolverines the next day and Henry Larkin of the A.A. Philadelphia Athletics on the 16th.

Boy! That must have been exciting. I wonder if people back then had the same reaction to that thrilling sequence of events as I had to the Guzman-Drew-Beltre sequence last year. Fat lot of good that cyclefest did in June 1885. Within a half-dozen years, the Metropolitans, Wolverines and Athletics were all extinct.

Here’s something with a little more historical resonance than last year. The last time three big-league players hit for the cycle in the same calendar month was in June 1950, when George Kell of the Detroit Tigers did it on the second, Ralph Kiner of the Pirates on the 25th and Roy Smalley of the Chicago Cubs on the 28th.

Roy Smalley was the father of Roy Smalley — dad was Jr. and son was Roy III — who was a shortstop in the ’70s and ’80s, mostly for the Twins. It’s funny that the son, who was a pretty good hitter for a shortstop, never hit for the cycle but the father, a banjo hitter who never managed an OPS-plus above 85, did.

That’s how the cycle goes. It’s a random collection of events, a false “accomplishment,” important only because someone along the line thought it was kind of cool when it happened. There is no list of games in which players have hit two doubles and two home runs, a demonstrably better performance than a single, double, triple and home run.

But the thing is: That guy was right. The cycle is cool.