"A Thousand More, Please" Assessing What It Will Take for Jose Altuve to Reach 3,000 Hits
"A Thousand More, Please" Assessing What It Will Take for Jose Altuve to Reach 3,000 Hits
Altuve will need another 3500 or at bats to reach 3,000 hits. His health, aging curve, and longevity will determine if he can get there.
Many people congratulated Jose Altuve for reaching 2,000 hits last week. But it is likely that none meant more than the congratulations he received from Miguel Cabrera.
Cabrera recorded a video message for Altuve.
“My brother, ‘Tuve. Congratulations. What it means, 2000 hits…Congratulations, my brother. I love you. Keep going. God bless you.”
Cabrera’s message certainly meant a lot to Altuve because they are both Venezuelans, and because Cabrera is from Altuve’s hometown of Maracay. Cabrera, who reached the majors when Altuve was 13, was one of Altuve’s childhood heroes.
Cabrera’s message also included one more part, between the ellipses in the quote above, “A thousand more, please.”
Cabrera knows what of what he speaks. He notched his 3,000 hit last April, putting a capper on a career that will end with a plaque in Cooperstown.
And it leads to the obvious question; can Altuve join Cabera, and 32 of the most illustrious names in baseball history, in the 3,000 hit club.
In September of 2021, Dan Szymborski of Fangraphs used his ZiPS projection system to estimate the chances that specific players would get to 3,000 hits. The projection said that Altuve had a 34% chance of getting to 3,000 hits.
To many eyes, that may seem low. But Altuve’s chances were the third highest of any player that Szymborski projected. The two ahead of him were Albert Pujols, who had already achieved 3,000 hits and Cabrera, who was only 21 hits away at that time.
Behind Altuve was Freddie Freeman at a 28% chance, and then Fernando Tatis (before his lost 2022 season) at 20% and Juan Soto at 18%.
The lesson here is that it is hard to get to 3,000 hits. Even players like Soto, whose career start mirrors those of a number of Hall of Famers, is four times more likely not to get to 3,000 than to pass the mark.
Altuve has put in enough work to that point in his career to have a one-in-three chance to get to 3,000 hits. It’s about as good as you can do while still only two-thirds of the way there.
So what will it take for Altuve to get to 3,000 hits? Three major factors will determine whether Altuve can get to 3,000 hits: avoiding injuries, Altuve’s aging curve, and his longevity. I’ll address each of these in detail below.
Injuries
Note that Szymborski’s article is written in September of 2021. Since then, my educated guess is that Altuve’s chances have actually gone down. Why? It’s not his play on the field. Altuve has batted .303 since the article was published on September 23, 2021. And he’s not just hitting a bunch of singles. His wRC+ is 159 since then, which means that Altuve has batted 59% better than a league average hitter.
The reason that Altuve’s odds have gone down is because he has not played enough. He has been on the injured list three times since Szymborski’s article, once for a hamstring injury in 2022, once for an oblique injury in 2023, and, of course, one after he broke his thumb in a World Baseball Classic game this Spring.
In 2022, he played 141 games. This season, he’ll play 91 if he plays every game remaining in the season. If he played 150 games and hit .316 like he has in his 236 at bats this season, he would have garnered 74 more hits.
Of course, older players are more likely to get injured than younger players, so the chances that Altuve will miss significant time due to injuries over the next several years are not small.
Getting to 3,000 hits is in many ways less about the numerator in batting average (the number of hits) that it is about the denominator (the number of at bats). To get the number of at bats high enough to get 3,000 hits, a player needs to be lucky enough to have good health. We can’t predict Altuve’s health over the next few years, but we can hope for the best.
The Aging Curve
Over the course of his career, Altuve has slashed .307/.364/.469. Those are impressive numbers of course, and his career OPS+ is 128, 28% better than league average.
And further good news is provided by Altuve’s improved play in the last two seasons. After dipping below .300 in each of the 2019, 2020, and 2021 seasons, Altuve has improved, batting .300 (with a .921 OPS) in 2022 and .314 (with a .909 OPS) so far in 2023.
But those numbers will almost certainly come down over the next few years of his career. Let’s look at another example to prove the point. Take the Astro who made the 3,000 hit club—Craig Biggio. Through his Age 33 season, Biggio slashed .292/.381/.437 for a 124 OPS+. Impressive, of course. But after age 33, Biggio declined as a hitter, slashing .266/.338/.428 in his next eight seasons. His OPS+ shows the decline in his quality; it was 95, 5% worse than league average.
There is a old expression in sports about getting old: Father Time is undefeated. And while one will occasionally see an ageless wonder like Phil Niekro, Jamie Moyer, or Bartolo Colon, they all eventually age out of being effective players. Even Tom Brady retired…and meant it.
Players get worse over time, and in baseball, they usually peak in their late 20s. If Altuve maintains his .307 career batting average, he’ll need 3,257 at bats to get 1,000 more hits. But if his batting average declines 26 points as Biggio’s did, he’ll need an additional 301 plate appearances to get to 3,000. That’s another half-season of at bats.
Longevity
The question of how many at bats Altuve needs to get to 3,000 hits raises the question of how many more years Altuve will play to rack up those at bats.
The numbers in above section suggests that Altuve will need somewhere between 3300 and 3600 at bats to get another 1,000 hits. If he stays healthy and is a full time player, Altuve can do that in six seasons. Between 2012—Altuve’s first full season in the majors—and 2017, Altuve had 3,730 at bats. Of course, Altuve was quite healthy in that time period, missing only 47 games across those six seasons.
In Spring Training, Altuve told Chandler Rome, then with the Houston Chronicle, that “I want to play to 40. I love what I'm doing right now. I love my game. I enjoy my game, … When I go out there and put my uniform on, I really enjoy playing with these guys.”
Altuve turned 33 in May, so playing to 40 would give him 7 seasons to get those 3300 to 3600 at bats. He’ll likely need the extra year. Over the six seasons between 2018 and 2023, Altuve has racked up only 2590 at bats. Assuming he is healthy, he’ll likely get another 110 or so at bats this season to get him up to 2700 at bats in that period.
Obviously, the pandemic cost 102 games in 2020, but some of the lower number of at bats is caused by injuries. Altuve has missed 213 scheduled games since the start of the 2018 season.
All of this speaks to the first point. Altuve needs to avoid injuries to get to 3,000 hits. If he has only a handful of injuries, he’ll get enough at bats to get to 3,000 hits in either his age 39 or age 40 season. If not, well, he may either have to play longer than that, or career may end before he gets to 3,000 hits.
There is obviously no shame in having a great career and not getting to 3,000 hits, and Altuve will have a strong Hall of Fame case regardless of whether he gets to the 3,000 or not. But what’s the fun in that?
We Astros fans want the same thing that Miguel Cabrera does for Altuve: a thousand more, please.