Catching up on Career Milestone Projections

Jacob deGrom tallied his 2,000th strikeout last week, providing another late-career achievement that might be engraved on a Cooperstown plaque sometime in the 2030s. That deGrom would reach 2,000 strikeouts seemed almost certain back at the end of the 2020 season, when he was 641 away. At that time, he’d struck out at least 200 batters in four of his six non-pandemic seasons. The first of those two other seasons was his 2014 NL Rookie of the Year campaign, when he didn’t debut until May 15, and in 2016, injuries limited him to just 24 starts. But since 2020, deGrom has been an example of Zeno’s paradox, seeming perpetually stuck in medias res. Achilles did eventually catch the tortoise, and deGrom and calculus won the day.

deGrom’s journey to 2,000 is a good reminder of why I like to occasionally harass ZiPS for milestone probabilities rather than simply dividing a player’s remaining distance by his most recent seasonal number and calling it a day. Whether or not there are infinite universes where every possibility happens, in this one, tendons tear and players age. A player can be on pace to finish with 500 home runs for a decade and never come particularly close, while another can sneak in the back door to a milestone that nobody saw coming, as Nick Markakis threatened to do late in his career.

The uncertainty is what makes baseball (and life) interesting. I can tell you that Aaron Judge needs 115 homers to make it to number 500; I have a calculator for that, and even if I didn’t, I was once a third-grader. But the road is hard to map, and the aging curve, performance models, and injury models in ZiPS give us a better idea as to the probability that Judge will hit 500 or 600 in this particular universe. It’s no fun to have such a tool and not deploy it, so it’s a good time to do an update on baseball’s search for pretty, round numbers.

Freddie Freeman pulled within 500 hits of the 3,000-hit mark this year, and just as importantly, he did it without any significant decline. The longer he mostly defies Father Time, the steeper a decline has to be to prevent him from reaching the milestone. With a normal aging curve from here on out, he gets to 3,000 with probably a season or so to spare.

Jose Altuve ought to also pull within 500 by the end of the season, and though he’s the same age as Freeman, he has shown serious decline, so he’ll need a lot more fortune. Of the players with a long tail, meaning there’s enough uncertainty to make them plausible future 3,000-hit candidates, Bobby Witt Jr. looks to be in the most promising place. Machado needs to age very well, and of the late-20s guys who could still establish 3,000-hit runs, Julio Rodríguez and Juan Soto are the most likely. After Soto, the probabilities drop off quickly.

There are lots of hitters with an established shot at hitting 500 home runs, but as you’ll notice, many of them are older players, who are largely there because of their proximity. Nobody looks likely to threaten Barry Bonds’ all-time record of 762 or even to pass Albert Pujols’ total of 703 to move into fourth place on the career leaderboard.

Perhaps the most interesting player on this list is Junior Caminero, for a lot of the same reasons that Giancarlo Stanton projected similarly, in that he’s got a lot of home runs under his belt already and is extremely young. Caminero has been around for a while, but he only turned 23 last month, and he’s going to be near 100 homers by the end of this season. He has 87 career home runs now, with 35 so far this year, and if he hits the eight homers our projections have for him the rest of the way, he’ll rank ninth in AL/NL history for home runs through his age-22 season. Four of the eight players to hit more than 95 homers through their age-22 campaigns retired with more than 500 — Mel Ott (115 through age-22, 511 career), Eddie Mathews (112, 512), Alex Rodriguez (106, 696), Frank Robinson (98, 586) — while three others are still active and have at least a decent shot of getting to 500: Juan Soto (98, 265), Mike Trout (98, 424), Bryce Harper (97, 389).

Kyle Schwarber is likely to finish this season with 45-50 homers again, and his odds of reaching the 500 milestone are now better than a coin flip for the first time in his career. Remarkably, he also has an 11% chance at hitting 600 home runs, which is far from impossible. Judge’s injury this year has knocked about 40 homers off his career projection, and Stanton’s chance at 500 homers, which seemed like an easy number a decade ago, remains about a coin flip. He’ll have to get back on the field first, of course, and it’s in doubt that we’ll see him in the Yankees lineup again this year.

This chart is basically Luis Arraez. I almost cut it completely, but it’s interesting in how few players are on it. It’s funny seeing Chandler Simpson on there, but he’s close enough to .300 that he could get to the sunny side of it for a while, and perversely, the fact that he doesn’t have power or draw walks might mean that if he dips down to a .260-.270 mark for a season, he could lose his job very quickly — thereby preserving his career average above .300.

While there’s no chart of it, I can’t leave here without noting that Corbin Carroll has a 12% projected chance at recording 200 career triples and is a coin flip for 150. If Carroll gets to 200 triples, he’d become just the ninth member of the 200 Triple Club, and the first to join it since Tris Speaker in 1924. The last player to get to the 150 mark was Roberto Clemente in 1970, and before him, Stan Musial in 1954. Simply, nobody hits triples like Carroll does in today’s game, and nobody has for some time. ZiPS projects that no other active player will get to triple digits. The last player to reach 100 triples was José Reyes in 2012.

The 300 Win Club is all but officially not accepting any new members. While there are a couple of pitchers who round up to at least 1%, it’s basically a case of Paul Skenes and Jacob Misiorowski being a combination of awesome enough, young enough, and not yet having their elbows implode. As I’ve mentioned a few times in chats over the last couple of years, and as I wrote last year, ZiPS doesn’t see anyone as having 50% odds to make it to even 200 wins. If this holds true, either BBWAA voters will need to adjust to the expectations of modern baseball or we will have a lot of trouble inducting pitchers into the Hall of Fame. I’m hoping Félix Hernández’s progress in the voting and Cole Hamels’ solid are indications of the former.

Let’s put it this way: Michael Wacha may enter the 2027 season as sixth in wins among active pitchers. The youngest pitcher with 100 wins is José Berríos, who turned 32 a couple of months ago.

This chart looks a lot like the 200-win list, with Chris Sale and Gerrit Cole near the top. Dylan Cease and Tarik Skubal have the best shot of the mid-career pitchers, with a big dropoff until we get to Skenes and Misiorowski who, again, are awesome, young, and haven’t had their arms fall off yet. Yes, there is a Hunger Games component to pitching milestones.