Bryce Harper has done just about everything in a Phillies uniform. He had never done this.
On Saturday night in Philadelphia, Harper hit for the first cycle of his career, and he needed only five innings to finish it, as the Phillies buried the New York Mets 15-3.
He opened with a home run in the first inning, added a single and a double in the third, and completed the set with a triple in the fifth. Getting there that quickly gave Harper the second-fastest cycle in MLB history, behind only Mike Lansing, who pulled it off in four innings back in June 2000.
The triple was the hard part, and it was pure Harper: head down, helmet gone, a hard slide into third to lock up a feat that had eluded him for more than a decade in the big leagues.
The cycle is one of baseball’s quirkier achievements, prized less for difficulty than for its odd symmetry, a single, a double, a triple and a home run in one game, with the triple almost always the missing piece. Harper cleared his early, which is part of why the pace was so historic.
He did not even own the night’s loudest bat. Kyle Schwarber launched three home runs, turning a tight early game into a rout. Together, the two performances put the Phillies in rare company.
By league records, Philadelphia became just the second team in MLB history to get a cycle and a three-homer game from two different players on the same day. The only previous time, the New York Yankees did it in 1932.
For Harper, the timing carried its own weight. He had been scuffling at the plate, and a four-hit night that touched every base is the kind of statement that ends a slump in a hurry. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted he joined a short list of Phillies to ever hit for the cycle.
It capped a loud stretch for star hitters around the league. A day earlier the Dodgers were reshuffling their order around Shohei Ohtani’s paternity leave, and even the World Cup on home soil has not pulled the spotlight fully off baseball. The Phillies and Mets close their series on Sunday, though Harper, for one night, had nothing left to add to the box score.
