Can Freddie Freeman Re-Open the 3,000 Hit Club?

Two years ago, I wrote about the imminent demise of the 3,000 Hit Club after Miguel Cabrera became a member. Simply put, it was a question of math. The worse the environment is for hitting for batting average, the fewer players there will be who will put up lofty career hit totals. While it would be easy to think there are simply more lousy hitters these days, as league batting average has dropped in recent decades, the spread in individual batting averages has not increased; great players see lower batting averages when league batting averages decline. But while 2023’s new rules didn’t herald a reversal of the trend, one late entrant in the race for 3,000 hits has continued to excel: Freddie Freeman.

What makes the nadir of the 3,000 Hit Club so jarring to a baseball fan is the newness of this phenomenon. The explosion of offense in the 1990s wasn’t just homers, but batting average as well. Even going back 10 years, there were always a lot of players with career hit totals somewhere north of 2,000.

In 2023, that number is seven, and that’s only because there were four new members this year: Freeman, Jose Altuve, Elvis Andrus, and Andrew McCutchen. (I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Evan Longoria won’t get 72 hits over the next two weeks.) Contrast that with 2004, which featured 27 active players with 2,000 career hits.

That brings us back to Freeman. While he was always good at hitting for average throughout his 20s, his hallmark was his year-to-year consistency rather than amassing batting titles. Batting average tends to peak rather early, and Freeman wasn’t at the top of the leaderboards in either hits or batting average over the first decade of his career.

As noted above, most players see big batting average dips when they cross 30. Even looking just at players who managed 3,000 hits, their batting averages in their 30s were about 20 points lower than their 20s. Freeman didn’t get the memo, however; the three best batting averages of his career have all come within the last four seasons, despite league batting average bottoming out. This year, he’s at .335, arguably a more impressive number than his .341 in the shortened 2020 season.

To see how much progress Freeman has made, I went back and called up his final projected hits in ZiPS before each season of his career:

ZiPS liked Freeman fairly quickly, but his career hit projection stayed relatively stable after a few years, hovering somewhere in the 2,400–2,500 range. The last few years have changed that. His runway has become longer and longer, with the risk increasingly coming from a serious injury rather than decline. Now, he will decline, but like flying a hang glider, the higher you start, the longer before you hit the ground.

Here’s the updated career projection for Freeman through Sunday’s games:

This isn’t a particularly bullish outlook, with ZiPS projecting a fairly steady decline (as you should at these ages). But it’s still enough to net him 877 hits, which, with the 16 more projected in 2023, brings Freeman to 2,991. ZiPS actually has a milestone algorithm I wrote some years ago that reduces playing time less as a player nears a significant milestone, so the projection system now has Freeman more likely to get to 3,000 than to fall short, at 53%. With his projected homer total nearing 450 and his WAR likely to top 70, Freeman is increasingly becoming a good bet for Cooperstown.

Not many active players are likely to join Freeman at 3,000 hits, with ZiPS projecting, on average, only 1.6 players other than him reaching the mark. Here are the 23 active players with at least a 0.5% projected chance:

ZiPS still thinks that Altuve is going to run out of calendar, but his outlook has improved somewhat since 2021. The two biggest gainers this year, meanwhile, have been Acuña Jr. and Bichette.

While it’s still too soon to be writing any speeches or preparing any celebrations, Cabrera might want to consider leaving the lights on at the 3,000 Hit Club for Freeman.