Cycles seem more prevalent these days, I think because do many homers and doubles are being hit. But the ballparks have become so small that triples are really hard to hit.

Shortest time between cycles: Same day (2x) - George Burns, NYG & Bobby Veach, DET on 9/17/1920. Repeated by Stephen Drew, ARI & Adrian Beltre, SEA on 9/1/2008. There were also cycles hit on back-to-back days 6/9 & 6/10/1912.

Longest time between cycles: 1869 days (5+ yrs) - between Bill Joyce, WAS 5/30/1896 and Harry Davis, PHA 7/10/1901.

Shortest time for 3 cycles: 5 days (2x) - Christian Guzman, WAS (8/28/2008); Stephen Drew, ARI (9/1/2008); & Adrian Beltre, SEA (9/1/2008). Repeated by Orlando Hudson, LAD (4/13/2009); Ian Kinsler (4/15/2009); & Jason Kubel (4/17/2009). Incidentally, there were no cycles hit between these trifectas (not totally surprising, given the dates.) There were also 3 cycles hit in a span of 7 days in 1970.

Shortest time for 4 cycles: 16 days - In 1933, as listed by Jed in comment #4. (Though 8/2 - 8/17 is 16 days by my counting). The next shortest was 19 days, beginning with Mark Kotsay, ATL (8/14/2008) and ending with the trifecta from 8/28 to 9/1/2008 listed above.

Shortest time for 5 cycles: 55 days - Also in 1933. Add Arky Vaughan, PIT (6/24/1933) to the four listed above.

Shortest time for 6 cycles: 84 days - Again 1933. Add Chuck Klein, PHI (5/26/1933) to the five listed above.

The longest spans for 3, 4, 5, and 6 cycles were all between 1912 - 1920, since there were only 2 cycles hit between September 1912 and July 1920.

Incidentally, my algorithm counted calendar days between cycles, not MLB schedule days. Since the last three cycles hit in 2008 and the first three hit in 2009 were done within ~2 schedule months (last 4 days of August 2008, September, 4 scheduled regular season days in October, plus 13 scheduled days in April 2009 = ~51 schedule days by my count), I'd be very surprised if that were not a record as well. If you include Kotsay's cycle (8/14/2008), that's 7 cycles in ~65 schedule days!

Some incidental notes: 1) Cochrane, Higgins, and Foxx were all playing for the Athletics in 1933. That's three cycles for one team within 12 days, another record. 2) Averill played for the Indians in '33, so the four cycles within 15 days is also an AL record. 3) The leagues combined for eight cycles in 1933, four in each league. The highest number of cycles in any other season is six, achieved in 2004, 1976, and 1940.

Baseball Almanac pages for all historical and cycles. (It's my first time logging in here; apologies if I mess up the tags.)

According to the list of cycles (which I didn't manually analyze, I just pasted it into a spreadsheet) this had happened only once before since 1954. Last season Christian Guzman hit for the cycle on August 28th and then Stephen Drew and Adrian Beltre did it on September 1st.

The next shortest time period (since 1954) that 3 players hit for the cycle was in 1970. Tony Horton did it on July 1, Tommie Agee on the 6th and Jimmy Ray Hart on the 8th.