Miguel Cabrera scored with a single to right field in the first game of a Saturday doubleheader and delighted a packed stadium of Tigers fans as he scored his 3,000. career hit – and became the newest member of a respected MLB club. This club, which now has 33 members, has become much more crowded in recent years, as before Cabrera, 2015 (Alex Rodriguez), 2016 (Ichiro Suzuki), 2017 (Adrián Beltré) and 2018 one player each joined the 3,000 hit Brotherhood to (Albert Pujols). In the entire wildcard era, there wasn’t a single half-decade without a new player joining.
This rapid population does not follow the historical pattern. Between 1925 and 1970, when World War II cut short the careers of many stars, Paul Waner and Stan Musial were the only players to join. But as the league expanded to 30 teams and the season stretched to 162 games, more players had more opportunities to score more goals. At the beginning of the divisional era in 1969, the club had only eight members. Over the next half century, that number quadrupled.
But this rapid growth ends with Cabrera. From Musial’s 12-year wait in 1958 to Hank Aaron and Willie Mays in 1970, the longest gap between 3,000 hit club launches was seven years, from Rod Carew in 1985 to Robin Yount and George Brett in 1992. Based on the overwhelming pool of candidates hitting 3,000 next, the gap to Cabrera could challenge this drought, if not prolong it.
The short-term problem is that the only active players with more than 2,000 hits but less than 3,000 are Robinson Canó, who is 39 and declining; Yadier Molina, retiring after this season; and Joey Votto, who is now 38 and still has 965 hits short of 3,000. After this trio, the candidatures don’t get much more promising. Next on the active hits list is Nelson Cruz, who is 41 years old and has under 2,000 hits; Elvis Andrus, who has been one of MLB’s worst hitters for the past half decade; and Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria. This pair may seem more promising given that they strike at least 2021 – but there’s almost no precedent for players their age and hitting numbers eventually hitting 3,000.
The only 3,000 club members with fewer hits than McCutchen’s 1,826 in his season at age 34 are Cap Anson, who became the club’s first member in the 19th century, and Ichiro, a hitting wizard who would have reached the milestone only in MLB earlier if not for the time spent in Japan. Longoria, on the other hand, has fewer hits (1,818) than any club member his age (35).
The long-term problem that perhaps explains why so few players knock on the club’s door after Cabrera is that hits are harder to come by these days than they have been in decades, if not ever. Prior to this season, league-wide batting averages had fallen about 30 points since the 1990s and mid-2000s, when recently inducted players into the 3,000 clubs scored many of their hits. In 2021, MLB batters — excluding pitcher hitters — batted a .247 collective, which was the lowest total in an entire season since the Year of the Pitcher in 1968.
And that number has fallen even further so far this season. During Sunday’s games, the league hits .232 — which, even acknowledging that offense increases during the summer months, is a catastrophic drop compared to any previous season, even since the dead-ball era.
In such an offensive environment, how can anyone hope to hit as many as it takes to reach 3,000? In the 2000s, 5.8 players reached 200 hits per year. In the 2010s, just 2.3 players a year reached 200 — the lowest mark since the 1950s, when seasons were just 154 games instead of 162. In two of the last three full seasons (2018 and 2021) nobody reached 200 hits at all.
Additionally, the pandemic-shortened 2020 season has slashed over 100 hits from top players’ ledgers, which isn’t a deathblow to their career totals, but certainly doesn’t help given all the other modern-day obstacles. April 2020 ZiPS predictions for a possible full lost season, rather than partial, estimated that “an average of two [players] Anyone who could have achieved the 3,000-hit feat will now not do so due to a lost 2020 season.
Because of these structural issues, the top candidates trailing Cabrera to 3,000 appear further down the active hit list. José Altuve has 1,783 hits and Freddie Freeman has 1,723, both still going strong and both just beginning their seasons at the age of 32. But even Altuve and Freeman are still a good seven years away, even if they make it. And they probably won’t either: Along with Altuve and Freeman, 37 other players in league history have amassed between 1,700 and 1,800 career hits by age 31 — including 18 Hall of Famers — and just three hit 3,000. That’s an 8 percent success rate.
Altuve and Freeman probably have a better chance than just that 8 percent. Although Altuve is currently on the injured list, both have scored well since the start of last season and should remain regulars for years to come. But they are still much more likely to miss the milestone than to reach it. According to ZiPS projections late last season, Altuve has a 34 percent chance of joining the 3,000 hit club, while Freeman is just behind at 28 percent. They are the only active players over 20 percent.
If neither Altuve nor Freeman hit 3,000, we may have to wait another decade for the first competitor to Cabrera, if not longer. The ZiPS projections gave no member of the generation led by Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado a better than 5 percent chance of reaching 3,000.
Even Trout, the best player of his time, has experienced a dramatic slowdown in his stroke speed due to injuries. From 2012 to 2016, Trout averaged 183.4 goals per season, but from 2017 to 2021 it was just 100.4. Trout ranked 14th all-time in hits through age 24, one spot ahead of Hank Aaron. He then fell back to 113th all-time by age 29, one spot ahead of Billy Butler.
Trout also encounters another problem that plagues potential hitters with 3,000 hits: he’s counterintuitively too good at racking up all the hits he needs. The top seven players in AL/NL history are Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, Barry Bonds, Trout and Mickey Mantle, according to wRC+, which adapts to park and league context. None of them reached 3,000 hits. (To be fair, Trout could still do it, and Williams almost certainly would have had it not missed three seasons due to World War II.)
Why did they fall short? A common trait in the group is a high walk rate: Because pitchers feared Ruth and Bonds and Co., they pitched a lot around those batters—which meant they still got to base and helped their teams, but no hits in the process collected . Check out this chart that shows the differences between the top hitters in MLB history and the players who reached 3,000 hits. (Trouts are not included in this chart.)
The two best walk rates of the 3,000 hit club members come from Rickey Henderson (16.0 percent) and Carl Yastrzemski (13.2 percent). They compensated for those “lost” hits with tremendous longevity: Yaz and Henderson rank second and fourth, respectively, in league history for appearances on the turntables.
A modern player like Juan Soto, who made his debut aged 19, could theoretically play as long as these Hall of Famers – but that’s an impossible prediction to make so early in his career. For now, all we know is that Soto, like the other all-timers who hit just under 3,000, “loses” some hits due to a career walk rate of 18.8 percent — the fifth-highest in history, behind only Williams, Bonds , a 1920s second baseman named Max Bishop and Ruth. For comparison, the average member of the 3,000 hit club has a 9.8 percent walk rate. If Soto’s “extra” walks above that number were singles instead, he would have an extra 900 hits in a career of 10,000 record appearances.
Despite this, Soto is one of six active players with a feather in their projected 3,000 hit caps. These half-dozen hopefuls are all ahead of the average pace of players at the 3,000-hit club of their respective ages at the end of last season:
- Manny Machado had 1,425 hits in his season at the age of 28, ahead of the 1,355 average pace. Machado is itching to start the 2022 season and he has remained healthy, playing in more games than any other player since 2014. But in Machado ‘s previous two full seasons in San Diego , he has scored fewer than in any healthy season in Baltimore . I would take his 3 percent quote from the ZiPS forecasts, but he has a long way to go and little room for error.
- Ozzie Albies and Rafael Devers had 613 and 598 hits respectively by the age of 24, ahead of the average tempo of 588.
- Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had 485 and 372 hits respectively over their 22-year seasons, ahead of the median of 329.
- Wander Franco had 81 hits in his season at the age of 20, before the average pace of zero. (Yes, zero – most club members started their careers after the age of 20.)
Conclusion: No active player has a realistic chance of reaching 3,000 hits in the next half decade. Altuve and Freeman each have a 1 in 3 chance they would complete in about seven years. If both fall short, Machado could be the next best bet in a decade. And if he falters too, we’ll probably wait another 15 years for one of the game’s brightest under 25 stars to break the longest drought in nearly a century.
Unless the sport fundamentally changes, with new rules implemented to reverse the ongoing decline in hit numbers, it will be a long time before a new member joins the 3,000 hit club – which means we’ll see the performance of Cabrera and Pujols and Beltré should celebrate and Ichiros before his, even more so in the meantime.
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