This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo's Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

When Eduardo Escobar came to the plate in the ninth inning on Monday, having already produced a single, a double and a homer in four plate appearances, he told himself he was going to run toward third base no matter what. There’s a reason why “triple shy of the cycle” has become a baseball cliché. While there have been 292 cycles in Major League history, according to Baseball Reference data, there have been 15,516 instances in which a player has fallen a triple shy of one.

Put another way, only 1.8 percent of those who record a single, double and homer in a game finish the job by adding a triple as well.

It got me thinking about the mindset a player requires to complete a cycle in any form. After all, it’s an individual achievement within a team game, and in some cases, it requires a bit of selfish thinking -- trying to take third base on a ball in the gap, for example, if it means risking getting thrown out in a game you might lose.

I asked Keith Hernandez, who is one of the 11 players in Mets history to complete a cycle, and he said he felt far more confident about his because he came to the plate in the 12th inning needing only a single. Rather than try to “do too much,” in the parlance of another baseball cliché, Hernandez simply waited for an outside pitch and punched it into left field. Had he needed a home run to complete the cycle, Hernandez said, “I would have had such a negative thought in my mind, it never would have happened.”

Escobar simply required the type of luck that is a prerequisite for so many triples. He hit his in such a perfect spot -- short-hopping the right-field fence and ricocheting the ball well out of the reach of Nomar Mazara -- that the only question was whether Escobar might try for an inside-the-park home run instead.

“It’d still be a cycle, wouldn’t it, if he got thrown out at the plate?” Mets manager Buck Showalter mused after the game. “Now, I’m surprised [third-base coach] Joey Cora didn’t send him.”