The 3,000 Hit Club Is Closed for Maintenance

Batting average may have rightfully lost its sex appeal in player evaluation, but not everything that’s fun needs to be a measure of a player’s overall value. We’ve been treated to eight new members of the 3,000 hit club over the last 20 years; that’s a quarter of the 3,000-hitsmen in baseball history, with a few more just outside that arbitrary endpoint. Miguel Cabrera almost certainly won’t get the 21 hits he needs to reach the milestone over Detroit’s nine remaining games this season, but he should get there sometime in early 2022. After he does, however, baseball won’t have to print any more membership cards for a while.

By definition, players who end up with 3,000 career hits necessarily must have had 2,000 hits at some point. In 2021, we have fewer active 2,000-hit hitters than at any other “normal” time in baseball history:

There was only a single batter with 2,000 career hits after the 1952 season: Stan Musial, who had 2,023. But that bottleneck is hardly surprising given that many of baseball’s stars missed multiple seasons due to service in World War II. There were 10 active 1,500-hit hitters that year and six of them (Musial, Johnny Mize, Enos Slaughter, Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, and Mickey Vernon) went to war. Baseball set a record for the most active players with 2,000 hits fairly recently, with 27 after the 2004 season. Right now, there are only five: Cabrera, Robinson Canó, Yadier Molina, Albert Pujols, and Joey Votto.

The 1990s have the well-deserved reputation of being a home run era but people don’t always remember that it was a high batting average era as well. The league’s batting average during that decade peaked at .271 in 1999, the highest figure since 1939. Part of the reason the 90s don’t have a reputation as a batting average-heavy era is that you didn’t see many players flirting with the .400 mark, especially compared to the last time league batting averages had gone that high. Except for the occasional small uptick — including all of the expansion years — the spread of batting average among hitters has become narrower over time:

That weird outlier blip in 2020 is, naturally, due to the 60-game season. Now, if the decline in league batting average was just due to a less talented pool of hitters, we’d expect there to be more dispersion, not less. Unless league offense changes, ZiPS projects only a single active player, Cabrera, to finish his career past the .300 mark.

So, when will we see another player get 3,000 hits once Cabrera does? None of the other players with 2,000 hits are great candidates. Canó needs two full excellent seasons or three full middling ones to get to 3,000, a tall order for a player who will be 39 and coming off a year-long PED suspension. Last month, Molina announced that he plans to retire after the 2022 season and it seems rather unlikely he’ll get the 900 hits he needs before then. Votto’s had a terrific 2021, but with a thousand hits to go, the calendar is likely too daunting. To get a sense of the rest, I turned to ZiPS to crank out some projections, like treehouse elves churn out cookies:

In this table (which is sortable), we have everyone with a 1% projected shot at 2,500 hits or better. After Cabrera accomplishes the goal next year, ZiPS only projects 1-2 currently active players to finish their career with 3,000 hits (1.6 to be exact). Over the next 12-15 years or so, only three players are currently on what I’d call a reasonable approach pattern. Freddie Freeman’s going strong, but needs to age well; Jose Altuve has wiped out the memories of his miserable 2020 season, though without a batting average like those he posted in his prime years. Canó’s a bit of a wild card, but a player who needs fewer than 400 hits and played solid baseball the last time we saw him is inevitably going to have at least some chance of attaining the milestone, though the caveats I mentioned above still apply.

But beyond that, the ranks are thin. Even Mike Trout has largely fallen away. He’s already a Hall of Famer based on what he’s done in his 20s, but he hasn’t had a 150-hit season since 2016 and he basically needs 10 of those and then some to get to 3,000 hits. In all-time hits, Trout was 15th through his age-22 and 22nd through his age-25 seasons. Assuming he’s done for the year, he now ranks 113th all-time in hits through a player’s age-29 season, behind such names as Juan Pierre, Justin Upton, and Ruben Sierra. After Altuve, Freeman, and Canó, it’s basically a wait to see what happens with the three Juniors and Juan Soto.

That is, unless baseball is changed somehow, whether in terms of equipment or rules, to incentivize hitters to trade power for contact. And baseball might change. While I can’t imagine voting for a player for the Hall of Fame based on his hit total, as I said up top, it’s still fun. Baseball’s numbers do have an aesthetic value beyond the value of the performance they reflect. I couldn’t care less about 3,000 hits or 300 wins as an evaluative measure, but it’s still cool to see a guy hit those pretty, round numbers. Numbers like that link what goes on in today’s game with baseball’s past, which is useful for a sport that tends to have more sepia-toned sentimentality than football or basketball. Cal Ripken Jr. would not have been any less of a player if he had taken a day off in 1991 and hadn’t caught Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak, but I’d be missing the memory of watching him do it in September of 1995, when the game was halted for what seemed like a half-hour because of the tumult of the crowd. I couldn’t tell you which game pushed Barry Bonds’ career WAR past Willie Mays‘, but seeing Juan Soto or Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a milestone that Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ty Cobb achieved would be fun.

So enjoy Cabrera collecting his 3,000th hit; it could be the last one we see for a while. And that’s too bad. After all, records are made to be broken, and milestones to be attained.