June 6, 2022: Eduardo Escobar hits for cycle, drives in 6 runs as Mets roll

Dissatisfied with the return on his $2.4 billion investment after a year as owner of the New York Mets – a sub-.500 record and no playoffs – Steve Cohen doubled down after the 2021 season.1 He committed a chunk of his sizable fortune for a stable of accomplished free agents, pushing the club’s 2022 payroll well over Major League Baseball’s $210 million competitive-balance tax threshold.2 The wave of newcomers included three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer, reliever Adam Ottavino, outfielders Starling Marte and Mark Canha, and third baseman Eduardo Escobar.3

Heading into San Diego’s Petco Park for the start of a three-game series on Monday, June 6, the retooled Mets were flying high. On a 10-game swing through Southern California, they stood atop the NL East Division at 37-19 (.661), with an 8½-game lead over the second-place Atlanta Braves.

The Mets’ record was all the more impressive in that they’d had done it without their homegrown two-time Cy Young Award winner; Jacob deGrom hadn’t pitched since coming up with a stress reaction in his right scapula just before Opening Day.4 Contributions from the club’s high-profile free agents were major reasons why. Scherzer had anchored the rotation before straining an oblique on May 18, Ottavino was unscored upon in 12 of his last 13 relief appearances, Marte was hitting .316 with a .921 OPS over his last 17 games, and Canha was hitting over .300 for the year.

Only Escobar, batting just .227 with an OPS of .674, appeared to not be pulling his weight. That changed on the night of June 6, as Escobar led the Mets to an 11-5 rout of the Padres, notching the first (and ultimately only) cycle of his 13-season major-league career.  

Signed out of Venezuela in 2006 as a 17-year-old outfielder-pitcher by the Chicago White Sox, Escobar converted to shortstop as a minor leaguer.5 He debuted with Chicago in 2011, then was dealt three times over the next decade during the major leagues’ annual end-of-July trading bazaar. He went to the Minnesota Twins in 2012, the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2019, and – two weeks after his lone All-Star Game appearance – the Milwaukee Brewers in 2021.  

Upbeat, supportive, and infectiously energetic, Escobar was admired wherever he went. Twins teammate Brian Dozier called him “the ultimate clubhouse guy,” adding, “[Y]ou smile a little more when he’s around.”6 The 33-year-old quickly endeared himself to many of his new Mets teammates when he bought dozens of Travis Jankowski “shirseys” for players to wear when the reserve outfielder, who was also new to the club, joked in a locker-room interview that nobody would buy his jersey.7

Entering the Mets series, the Padres were in second place in the NL West, two games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers. Manager Bob Melvin sent southpaw Blake Snell, the 2018 AL Cy Young Award winner, to the mound in front of a crowd of 34,858. The start of Snell’s season had been delayed over a month by a groin injury,8 and he was still finding his footing, going 0-2 with a 4.80 ERA in three starts.

New York’s highly decorated new manager, Buck Showalter,9 gave the start to Carlos “Cookie” Carrasco, a longtime Cleveland Indian and native of Venezuela who, like Snell, was in his second year as a National Leaguer. The 2019 AL Comeback Player of the Year and Clemente Award winner,10 Carrasco was having a bounce-back year after a forgettable (1-5 with a 6.04 ERA over 12 starts) 2021 campaign. He entered the game 6-1 with a 3.63 ERA.

Escobar’s first hit capped a three-run Mets rally in the top of the first. With two out and the bases loaded, Snell walked Mets fill-in first baseman J.D. Davis to force in the initial run of the game.11 Escobar followed by lacing a Snell changeup to the opposite field for a single, bringing in DH Pete Alonso – who was getting a break from his role as the Mets’ regular first baseman – and Canha to put New York up, 3-0.

Jurickson Profar, San Diego’s Swiss Army Knife,12 greeted Carrasco with a leadoff double in the bottom of the first but was left stranded. Two innings later, Profar brought the Padres a run closer with a single to left that scored catcher Jorge Alfaro after he’d doubled. Profar rounded the bag too far on Canha’s throw to the plate, and catcher Tomás Nido gunned him down trying to get back to first.

The Mets pushed their lead back to three in their next turn at bat, kicked off by Escobar’s second hit of the game, a first-pitch double to deep left-center off Snell’s four-seam fastball. Escobar moved to third on Jeff McNeil’s fly out and came home on Brandon Nimmo’s single up the middle.

In the fifth, Alonso reached on Padres third baseman Manny Machado’s throwing error. Canha followed with a double down the left-field line, putting runners at second and third with no outs. With Davis coming up, Melvin brought in well-rested rookie righty Steven Wilson.13 Davis hit a fly to center that plated Alonso for a 5-1 lead, but Padres first baseman Eric Hosmer cut off center fielder Trent Grisham’s throw home and gunned down Canha trying to take third.

Carrasco held San Diego in check through the middle innings, retiring 12 of 13 batters before Ha-Seong Kim’s infield single with two out in the seventh. Nomar Mazara doubled down the right-field line and Kim scored to pull San Diego back within three. Carrasco ended the uprising by fanning Alfaro swinging for his 10th punchout of the game.

After working a season-high three innings, Wilson was replaced in the eighth by veteran Craig Stammen. Davis led off by ripping a single to right and Escobar rifled a full-count sinker over the right-field fence for his fifth home run of the season. Three-for-four so far, he was now a triple shy of a cycle.

Leading 7-2, Showalter replaced Carrasco in the bottom of the eighth with lefty Joely Rodríguez, co-author of a the second-ever Mets no-hitter five weeks earlier.14 A one-out single by Profar and walk to Jake Cronenworth brought Machado to the plate and Drew Smith in from the bullpen. Smith retired Machado but on his next pitch surrendered a 408-foot home run to straightaway center field by Luke Voit, the 2020 major-league home-run champion.

Stammen came back out for the ninth, but after one-out singles by Alonso and Canha, he was replaced by lefty Tim Hill, who retired Davis on a line drive to center. Up next was Escobar.

Five times in his career, Escobar had been a triple shy of a cycle in his final at-bat and failed to get one, including one year earlier as a member of the Diamondbacks in a game also played at Petco Park.15 This time would be different. Knowing he needed a triple for the cycle, Escobar “joked that he was going to try for third base no matter where the ball landed.”16

Down in the count 1-and-2, Escobar sliced a 90-mph sinker over the head of Mazara in right that short-hopped the fence. Once the ball bounced away from the Padres right fielder, Escobar turned on the jets, cruising into third with a stand-up triple as his teammates cheered him on from the third-base dugout railing. As Bernie Wilson of the San Diego Union-Tribune described it, Escobar “pumped his right arm, clapped his hands and blew a kiss skyward.”17 His two RBIs on the triple gave Escobar six for the game, one shy of a career high.18

The Mets weren’t done opposite-fielding the Padres. McNeil, a lefty on his way to the NL batting crown, followed with a double to left, scoring Escobar, and righty Nido singled to right, scoring McNeil. New York led 11-5.

Smith retired the Padres in order in the ninth, giving Carrasco his seventh win, which tied him with the Dodgers’ Tyler Anderson for the most major-league victories.

“Any guy is fun to watch [hit for a cycle],” said Showalter afterward, a witness to four previous cycles by players he managed.19 “[E]specially him, what he means to his teammates. It’s almost like they hit it.”20 An appreciative Carrasco told reporters, “It was really fun to watch what he did today.”21 Escobar said, “This is a great moment. It’s unbelievable. Today’s a special night for me. Most important is the win.”22

Escobar became the 11th Met to hit for the cycle, the oldest Met to hit for a cycle (33 years, 152 days), and the first Met to do it since Scott Hairston against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field on April 27, 2012.23 Escobar’s cycle was also the first at 19-year-old Petco Park.

Never again during 2022 did the Mets enjoy a lead over Atlanta as large as the nine-game cushion they held after this contest. They lost the NL East crown to the Braves on a head-to-head tiebreaker and settled for a wild-card berth in the postseason. In the inaugural year of the best-of-three wild-card series format, New York lost to the Padres in three games. Escobar accounted for the only New York run in their Game One loss, clubbing a fifth-inning home run off winner Yu Darvish at New York’s Citi Field. 

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Mike Huber and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the Sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Almanac.com Baseballsavant.mlb.com, Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, and Stathead.com websites, including box scores and play-by-play at these links:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SDN/SDN202206060.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2022/B06060SDN2022.htm

Notes

1 Cohen purchased the Mets for $2.4 billion from the Wilpon family in November 2020. Ronald Blum, “New Mets Owner Cleans House,” Glens Falls (New York) Post-Star, November 7, 2020: B1.

2 By the end of the 2022 season, New York’s payroll was just under $288 million. Danny Abriano, “Analysing Mets’ Payroll Situation for 2023 and Beyond Following Offseason Spending Spree,” SNY TV website, January 24, 2023, https://sny.tv/articles/analyzing-mets-payroll-2023-beyond-offseason-spree.

3 Scherzer, Marte, Canha and Escobar were all signed in a two-day period at the end of November 2021.

4 Tim Healy, “DeGrom ‘Really Frustrated,’” Newsday (New York, New York), April 4, 2022: A40.

5 Tim Healy, “Milestone for Escobar,” Newsday (New York, New York), May 22, 2022: A66.

6 Jerry Crasnick, “’You Smile a Little Bit More When He’s Around,” MLBPA website, https://www.mlbplayers.com/eduardoescobar, accessed September 15, 2024.

7 “Jankowski Could Miss Two Months After Finger Surgery,” New York Daily News, May 28, 2022: 34; SNY Travis Jankowski Quote, X.com (@SNYtv), May 3, 2022, https://x.com/SNYtv/status/1521670434583945221.

8 “Wheeler Deals Shutout,” Lancaster (Pennsylvania) News, May 19, 2022: A19.

9 Three times before in his then 20-year managerial career, Showalter had been voted AL Manager of the Year: with the New York Yankees in 1994, the Texas Rangers in 2004, and the Baltimore Orioles in 2014.

10 Diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in June 2019, Carrasco underwent successful treatment, which allowed him to return to the mound for Cleveland in early September of that year. His fight to overcome leukemia earned him recognition that extended well beyond the sport. See, for example Darayus Sethna, “Carlos Carrasco: One Tough ‘Cookie,’” Immigration America website, https://www.immigration-america.com/blog/immigrant-athletes/carlos-carrasco-one-tough-cookie, accessed September 14, 2024.

11 Davis was manning first for the first time since 2018, when he played for the Houston Astros. He was thrust into that role because Showalter elected to have his regular first baseman, Pete Alonso, DH shortly after the team’s previous backup first baseman, Dominic Smith, had been sent down to Triple-A Syracuse.

12 During his first two seasons in San Diego, 2020 and 2021, Profar started 10 games or more at five different positions – each outfield position, first base, and second base.

13 Wilson, a middle reliever making his 19th appearance, had last worked seven days earlier, when he allowed three earned runs in two-thirds of an inning against the St. Louis Cardinals.

14 On April 30, 2022, Rodríguez was one of five Mets hurlers who combined to craft the second no-hitter in Mets history, against the Philadelphia Phillies at New York’s Citi Field. (Johan Santana had the first, on June 1, 2012.)

15 Escobar had a home run, double, and single in his first three at-bats against Padres pitchers on June 26, 2021, but failed to triple in his final two plate appearances, the last a groundout in the top of the eighth inning off Nick Ramírez. Other instances where he needed a triple in his final turn at bat for a cycle included three times when he was a member of the Twins (on May 6, 2015, against the Oakland A’s, July 30, 2016, against the White Sox, and September 8, 2017 against the Kansas City Royals) and once as a member of the Diamondbacks (on September 29, 2017 against the Detroit Tigers).

16 Anthony DiComo, “Escobar First Met to Hit for Cycle in 10 years,” MLB website, June 7, 2022, https://www.mlb.com/news/eduardo-escobar-hits-for-cycle.

17 Bernie Wilson, “Escobar Hits for Cycle, Has 6 RBIs as Mets Beat Padres, 11-5,” San Diego Union-Tribune, June 7, 2022, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2022/06/07/escobar-hits-for-cycle-has-6-rbis-as-mets-beat-padres-11-5.

18 Escobar twice collected seven RBIs in a game, each time while playing for the Arizona Diamondbacks during a game at Chase Field against the Washington Nationals in which he went 3-for-5 and hit two home runs: on August 3, 2019, and May 15, 2021.

19 “Cycle Charm,” New York Daily News, June 8, 2022: 38. The four were hit by New York Yankee Tony Fernandez on September 3, 1995, Arizona Diamondback Luis Gonzalez on July 5, 2000, Texas Ranger Mark Teixera on August 17, 2004, and Texas Ranger Gary Matthews Jr. on September 13, 2006.

20 “Escobar Hits for Cycle, Has 6 RBIs as Mets Beat Padres, 11-5.”

21 “Escobar First Met to Hit for Cycle in 10 Years.”

22 “Escobar Hits for Cycle, Has 6 RBIs as Mets Beat Padres, 11-5.”

23 Ed Eagle, “Players Who Have Hit for the Cycle,” MLB website, August 15, 2024, https://www.mlb.com/news/players-who-hit-for-the-cycle-c265552018.