Houston Astros: Jose Altuve and the quest for 3000 career hits
Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve is off to a great start in accumulating hits through his first seven seasons but has a long hill to climb to join the 3000 Hit Club.
Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve is a hitting machine. He stands small at the plate but hits big, lashing line drives all over the park. He began his career as .280-.290 hitter who didn’t hit for much power but stole around 30 bases per year. In 2014, he broke out with a league-leading .341 batting average. He also led the league in hits and steals and banged out 47 doubles. It was a preview of what was yet to come.
In 2015, Altuve finished 10th in AL MVP voting and again led the league in hits and steals, while hitting more than twice as many homers as he ever had in a season. He was even better last year, with a 3rd place finish in AL MVP voting, a league-leading .338 average and 216 hits, and a new career high in home runs, with 24. The little man was showing big power.
Altuve is at it again this year. He’ll lead the league in average for the third time in four years and will very likely lead the league in his for the fourth straight year. His next home run will set a new career high and he should finish either first or second in AL MVP voting, with Aaron Judge standing tall alongside him as the two best players in the AL this year.
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Taking a long-term look at Altuve’s career, a baseball fan might wonder how he stacks up against the 31 members of the 3000 Hits Club at the same age. Does Altuve have a good chance to join the two most-recent members of that elite club, Ichiro Suzuki and Adrian Beltre?
Altuve has 1246 hits this year and is projected for five more by the FanGraphs Depth Charts. Let’s make it an even 1250. That will put him 45th all-time in hits for a player through his age-27 season, between Andruw Jones (1254) and Johnny Bench (1246), neither of whom came within 900 hits of the 3000 mark.
It’s interesting to look at the 31 members of the 3000 Hits Club. Nearly one-third of them had fewer than 1000 hits through his age-27 season. The median hit total for this group at this age is 1175 hits. Altuve would place ninth in hits through his age-27 season among the group of 3000 Hits guys, so he’s off to a terrific start.
Of course, as is the case with many things in life, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. That is especially true with the difficult task of getting 3000 hits in a major league career. All of these players needed to play at a high level for a long period of time to reach the magic number. In the case of the all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, he didn’t even play at a high level for the last seven years of his career, he just kept writing himself into the lineup. Of course, Rose already had more than 3000 career hits by this time, but putting himself in the lineup helped him reach the 4000 hits mark.
The flip side are the players who got off to blazing starts, but never made it to 3000 hits. Of the 45 players who have more hits than Altuve through their age-27 season, only eight made it to 3000. One more, Albert Pujols, will likely get there next year, and Miguel Cabrera is a couple years away. If they both make it, that would be 10 of 45 players. And those are the players who are ahead of Altuve’s pace. This group includes two players, Mel Ott and Vada Pinson, who each had 300 more hits than Altuve at a similar age and still failed to reach 3000.
Baseball Prospectus has a projection system called PECOTA. Altuve’s 50th percentile PECOTA projection for this year called for 190 hits. He’ll likely finish with around 205, so he’s outpacing his 2017 projection. PECOTA also does long-range forecasts. Altuve’s projection for the next nine years is 1423 hits.
This projection should improve when Altuve’s 2017 statistics are factored in, but even with “just” 1423 more hits over the next nine years, Altuve will be sitting at 2673 after his age-36 season. That’s behind the pace of Adrian Beltre, the 3000 Hits Club’s most recent member. It’s also behind the pace of Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, the next two players likely to join Beltre and the others. This shows just how difficult it will be for Altuve to get there.