Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera became the 100th MLB player to reach 2,500 hits and the eighth to do it by the end of their age 33 season.
Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera knocked a line drive single to right in the third inning of the Tigers’ 9-5 victory over the Indians on Sunday for the 2,500th hit of his career. Cabrera’s hit came off of Trevor Bauer and was the sixth hit he’s had off of Bauer in his career. Bauer shouldn’t feel bad, though. There are 84 pitchers who have allowed more hits to Miggy, including James Shields, who’s given up 24 of Cabrera’s 2,500 hits. Cabrera has crushed Shields in his career, hitting .375/.431/.672 off of the veteran right-hander.
At the age of 33, Cabrera is having another great season. His .309/.387/.545 batting line is a bit below his career mark of .320/.398/.561, but still 46 percent better than the average hitter when league and park effects are taken into account (146 wRC+). He’s helped his Tigers stay alive in the Wild Card race, as they sit just 2.5 games behind the Toronto Blue Jays with 13 games to play.
For those who like nice, round numbers, Cabrera is the 100th player in major league history to reach 2,500 hits. He’s also the youngest to reach 2,500 hits since Hank Aaron in 1967, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Even as he slows down a bit due to age, Cabrera has a good chance of reaching 3,000 hits within three years. He’s currently fifth in career hits among active players, trailing only Ichiro Suzuki, Adrian Beltre, Albert Pujols and Carlos Beltran. He’s also three years younger than the next-youngest player in that group (Pujols).
Cabrera’s 2,500th hit put him in an even more select group than the 100 hitters in the 2,500-hit club. He’s also just the eighth player in history to reach the milestone before the end of his age 33 season, joining an impressive group of all-time great hitters. Here is a look at the other seven players who have banged out 2,500 hits by their age 33 season.
Growing up in Maryland, Jimmie Foxx played multiple sports as a kid, but was particularly good at baseball. He dropped out of high school and joined a minor league baseball team managed by former Philadelphia Athletics player Frank “Home Run” Baker. Foxx was quickly noticed by the Athletics and New York Yankees. He signed with the A’s and made his major league debut as a 17-year-old, when he would have been a junior in high school.
Foxx only had 191 plate appearances across three years when he was in his teens, but hit .339/.396/.515, which is very impressive for a player so young. He got 473 plate appearances as a 20-year-old in 1928, then began a string of full-time play over the next 13 years playing for the Athletics and the Red Sox. This was a sustained period of excellence for Foxx, which allowed him to reach 2,500 hits by the end of the 1941 season, when he was 33 years old. During this stretch, he led the league in home runs four times, RBI three times, hitting twice, on-base percentage three times and slugging percentage five times.
The 1941 season in which Foxx passed the 2,500 hit mark was Foxx’s last good season. After six years with the Red Sox, Foxx was sold to the Chicago Cubs in June of the 1942 season. Boston players and fans were not happy, but Foxx was no longer the player he’d once been. After the trade, he hit .205/.282/.288 for the Cubs. He then sat out the 1943 season. He volunteered for the military in 1944, but was rejected because of a sinus condition. He ended up playing 15 games for the Cubs, going 1-for-20.
With World War II still going in 1945, Major League Baseball needed warm bodies to play. Foxx went back to his roots in Philadelphia, but played for the Phillies, not the A’s, this time. He hit .268/.336/.420 in 89 games. He also volunteered to pitch when needed and posted a 1.59 ERA in 22.2 innings.
Foxx retired from Major League Baseball for good after the 1945 season, at the age of 37. Fifteen years later, he accepted an invitation to manage the Fort Wayne Daises, which was a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In the 1992 film A League of Their Own, the manager played by Tom Hanks was based loosely on Foxx, with artistic license, of course. The women who played for Foxx said he was a gentleman, while Hanks’ character was often rude and crude.
Of the seven players other than Miguel Cabrera who had 2,500 hits through their age 33 season, Jimmie Foxx has the fewest hits over the rest of his career, with just 130. The other six players averaged nearly 700 hits.
Mel Ott started his career at the youngest age of any of the eight players on this list. He turned 17 less than two months before his first major league game on April 27, 1926. Despite being so young, Ott hit .383/.393/.417 in 61 plate appearances as a rookie. Two years later he started to get regular playing time when he played 124 games as a 19-year-old for the 1928 New York Giants. He hit 42 home runs as a 20-year-old the following season and his career took off. Including his age 20 season, Ott averaged 30 home runs per year for 14 years and led the league in long balls six times.
The Polo Grounds in New York was the perfect venue for Ott. He was a diminutive slugger (5’9”, 170) who took full advantage of his home park, the Polo Grounds, which had a short porch in right field. The park was just 258 feet down the right field line. With the ability to pull the ball into those seats, Ott hit 323 of his 511 career home runs at home. That’s 63.2 percent, which is the second-highest percentage of home runs at home for players with more than 300 career home runs (Chuck Klein is first, with 63.3 percent).
Ott is a baseball outlier when it comes to his size and ability to hit home runs. As Joe Posnanski writes, Ott was roughly the size of Davey Lopes or Bucky Dent, but with the home run power of much bigger men. Current Mariners outfielder Nori Aoki is listed at 5’9”, 175 pounds and has a career high of 10 home runs in a season. At the plate, Ott had an exaggerated front leg lift, like Harold Baines, Kirby Puckett and the Japanese home run champion, Sadaharu Oh.
In the second game of a doubleheader against the Cubs on August 30, 1942, Ott picked up his 2,500th career hit. He was 3-for-4 with two runs and two RBI. The game ended in a tie because Wrigley Field wouldn’t install lights for another 46 years. After the season in which he got his 2,500th hit, Ott had three more good seasons through the age of 36, then performed very poorly in parts of two more seasons. He hung up his spikes 124 hits shy of 3,000.
Like most of the players on this list, Alex Rodriguez came up to the big leagues as a teenager. A-Rod played 17 games with the Mariners as an 18-year-old in the 1994 season that was cut short by a labor dispute. He then played 48 games with the “Refuse to Lose” 1995 Mariners, the first team in franchise history to make the playoffs. In his two teenage years in the major leagues, A-Rod hit a combined .224/.257/.352 in 65 games.
The 1996 season was the breakout year for Rodriguez. As a 20-year-old shortstop, he hit .358/.414/.631 while leading the league in runs scored, doubles and total bases. It was one of the greatest seasons any shortstop has ever had. Amazingly, in what can only be described as ridiculous, the BBWAA gave the AL MVP Award to Juan Gonzalez, who trailed A-Rod in every hitting category except for home runs and RBI. A-Rod had 52 more runs, 45 more hits and 21 more doubles than Juan-Gone, and also outhit him by 44 points and out-OBP’d him by 46 points.
Once he got going, Rodriguez took off. He made the All-Star team in 12 out of 13 years from 1996 to 2008 and finished his age 32 season with 2,404 hits. A-Rod’s age 33 season was 2009. This year would be delayed, though, because A-Rod needed hip surgery. He missed the first month of the season, but returned with a three-run jack on the first pitch he saw. He got his 2,500th hit in September of 2009 when he singled to center off of Orioles right-hander Jason Berken.
Rodriguez played six more years after his age 33 season and picked up another 584 hits. He was a four-win player player in two of these six years, a two-to-three win player in two years, and below average in the other two. He retired earlier this year when he saw the handwriting on the wall that the Yankees were going with a youth movement.
Robin Yount picked up his 2,500th hit on July 2, 1989 in a game in which he was 3-for-4 with five RBI. His Brewers beat the Yankees 10-2 in New York. This was back when the Brewers were in the American league and the Yankees were in the midst of a 13-year stretch of missing the playoffs. This is the longest playoff drought the Yankees have experienced since 1920. To give you an idea of the mediocrity of the 1989 Yankees, Yount’s hit was a ground ball single between third baseman Mike Pagliarulo and shortstop Wayne Tolleson. Catching that day was Bob Geren. The starting pitcher was Lance McCullers, but Yount got his 2,500th hit off of reliever Jimmy Jones.
As the announcers in the above clip pointed out, Yount was well on his way to a Hall of Fame career at this point. He had started his career as an 18-year-old shortstop in 1974 and was a mainstay in the Brewers’ lineup for the next 20 years. He won an MVP Award as a shortstop in 1982 when he hit .331/.379/.578 with 129 runs, 29 homers and 114 RBI. Three years later he shifted from shortstop to center field after going through two shoulder operations in the previous year-and-a-half.
The fielding metrics used at Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference do not rate Yount’s defense in center field kindly. He continued to hit well, but his value took a hit with the position switch. Still, he won another MVP award as a center fielder in 1989, the same year he had his 2,500th hit. Yount played another four seasons and added 540 more hits to his career total, but he wasn’t the player he had been. Age caught up to him. Through the age of 33, Yount hit .292/.345/.441. From age 34 on, he hit .257/.330/.381.
It was a very different world when Hank Aaron got his 2,500th career hit in 1967. According to this AP story from the time, neither Hank Aaron nor the Atlanta Braves realized Aaron had reached 2,500 hits. Aaron himself said, “I didn’t know how many I had.” A Braves spokesman confirmed that the team didn’t realize he had 2,500 hits until they rechecked the stats. From the linked article: “The spokesman explained the club statistician forgot to record an official scoring change that gave Aaron a hit and took away an error charged to Philadelphia’s Rich Allen in the second game of an April 30 doubleheader at Atlanta.”
Nowadays, everything a player does is tracked, from their hits and runs to their speed tracking down fly balls and the launch angle of the balls they are tracking. Aaron’s 2,500th hit came on June 12, 1967, back when there were two leagues with 10 teams each and no playoffs, just the World Series. Twitter wouldn’t be invented for another 40 years.
Hank Aaron’s age 33 season was a typical Hank Aaron season. He led the league in total bases for the seventh time and home runs for the fourth time, hitting 39. He also led the league in runs scored for the third time. He had 109 RBI and slugged .573. This was during a stretch of 21 straight All-Star seasons for the Hammer.
Unlike many of the players on this list, Aaron continued to be productive for many years after the season in which he got his 2,500th hit. He played nine more years, added another 1,153 hits, 274 homers, and 756 RBI, while hitting .283/.373/.533.
Baseball fans who know their history may remember that Rogers Hornsby was mentioned in the famous “There’s no crying in baseball” speech in the movie A League of Their Own. Tom Hanks’ character, manager Jimmy Dugan, is reprimanding his outfielder for missing the cutoff man when she starts to cry. During his “no crying” speech, Dugan says, “Rogers Hornsby was my manager and he called me a talking pile of pigs—. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game. And did I cry? No!”
Hornsby was a thoroughly unlikeable person, not unlike the next guy on this list. After his career as a player ended, he became a manager but was not well liked by his players. They felt he demanded too much. He couldn’t understand why they were unable to hit even after he imparted his vast knowledge to their lowly brains. As a manager of the 1952 St. Louis Browns, the players openly conspired to get him fire. Ned Garver joked, “It was force him out or kill him. It isn’t right to stay that mad at one man all the time.” They succeeded in getting him fired.
As a hitter Hornsby was exceptional. His .358 lifetime batting average is the second highest in history, behind only Ty Cobb. He led the league in hitting seven times, including three times with batting averages over .400. He was a two-time MVP and finished second in the voting in a season when he hit .424/.507/.696. (Pitcher Dazzy Vance won the award with a 28-6 record.)
Hornsby finished his age 33 season with 2,705 hits, but it would be his last full-time season. Injuries, including a broken ankle in 1930, would limit his playing time. He hung around for eight more years but averaged just 106 plate appearances per season. Of the seven players before Miguel Cabrera to reach 2,500 hits before the end of their age 33 season, Hornsby has the second-fewest hits from age 34 on. He finished 70 hits short of 3,000 for his career.
Ty Cobb was similar in batting skill and temperament to Rogers Hornsby. They were both amazing hitters, with Ty Cobb having the highest career batting average in MLB history (.366), and Hornsby having the second highest (.358). Cobb led the league in hitting 12 times, including nine in a row from 1907 to 1915. In the 14 years from 1909 to 1922, Cobb hit .384/.452/.539.
But boy was he mean. As Shirley Povich wrote in 1995 when the movie Cobb came out, “Yes, the greatest player of all time was baseball’s preeminent unconscionable scoundrel; as miserable a cretin as ever pulled on a uniform, and an outspoken racial bigot to boot.” Cobb was rumored to sharpen his spikes to hurt opposing players with hard slides. He also went into the stands and attacked a fan who had lost all but two of his fingers in a printing press accident and kicked and stomped the man.
Of the players with 2,500 hits by the end of their age 33 season, Ty Cobb has the most, with 2,856. He actually passed the 2,500 hit mark in his age 31 season. He also didn’t slow down much as he got older. Through the age of 33, Cobb hit .370/.433/.512. From that point on, he hit .360/.433/.512. His 1,333 hits after his age 33 season are the most of any player on this list.
