Manny Machado is on the verge of 2,000 hits. Could he be the last player to reach 3,000?

New York Times

20 hours ago

One night in April, after another line drive moved him closer to an uncommon milestone, Manny Machado heard a fellow member of the San Diego Padres raise a theory. Machado, the team's franchise third baseman, professes to have forgotten who said it. But the idea has stuck in his head.
Maybe it was the fact that the club had just faced the Houston Astros and Jose Altuve, owner of 2,294 career hits. Maybe it was Machado's proximity to hit No. 2,000. Maybe, more than anything, it was the audacity of it all.
If Machado were to eventually reach 3,000 hits, could he be the last to ever do it?
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'It does sound crazy,' Machado said, 'but at the same time, you kind of see how the game is going right now.'
A month before his 33rd birthday, Machado finds himself on the doorstep of an increasingly exclusive club. There are four active players — Freddie Freeman, Altuve, Andrew McCutchen and Paul Goldschmidt — with at least 2,000 hits. Machado, with only 28 more hits, will make it five. Yet, as recently as two decades ago, there were 27 such players.
This downward trend might only be accelerating. Pitchers are pairing unprecedented velocity with a greater understanding of how to manipulate spin and ball flight. The contact hitter is not extinct — indeed, there are hints that bat-to-ball is creeping back into style — but home runs and uppercut swings still drive team success and nine-figure contracts. While extreme shifts are now outlawed, defenses continue to be relentless in pursuit of optimal positioning.
'It's hard,' said Padres first baseman and three-time batting champion Luis Arraez. 'It's hard to hit the ball.'
In 2025, the leaguewide batting average remains under .250 for a sixth consecutive year. If the season were to end today, the average on balls in play would mark a 33-year low. Arraez, who at age 28 has 909 career hits, won his latest batting title with a mere .314 average. As players in their late 30s, McCutchen and Goldschmidt are long shots to even come close to 3,000 hits. Altuve was once considered a leading candidate, but he is showing signs of decline. Freeman is hitting as well as ever — and, like Altuve, is racing against time.
Machado, meanwhile, has a chance to achieve something none of these decorated veterans did: become the 55th player to record 2,000 hits before age 33. He also has a $350 million contract that runs through 2033 and came with the understanding that he would provide the bulk of his production on the front end.
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So far, the six-time All-Star has delivered few indications of offensive slippage. Machado spent much of the past three years playing through tennis elbow and then the lingering effects of reparative surgery. He still completed 2024 as the only active big leaguer to have hit at least 28 home runs in nine consecutive full seasons. (Machado hit 16 in the 60-game 2020 season.)
Now, he is batting .317 with a seemingly healthy elbow and some of the best underlying numbers of his career. In Thursday's 3-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants, he lined an opposite-field single and pulled a two-run drive to become the 33rd player with 350 home runs by age 32.
'It feels good,' Machado said, 'to just be somewhat normal and be able to get some good swings out and not really be on the training room table every single day.'
'I just see a level of even more consistency and clarity of what he's doing,' second-year Padres manager Mike Shildt said. 'I don't want to minimize that he hasn't had that previously, because he's an All-Star (and) Silver Slugger from last year. I just see a guy that's really comfortable where he's at, trusting the guys around him and not making the situation bigger than it is. Just putting a good stroke on it, which is one of the best right-handed swings I've seen.'
Added hitting coach Victor Rodriguez: 'He's healthy. He's not searching. He's not trying to feel how he can be comfortable. He's comfortable. And you see Manny sometimes get out of it, but the next day he's really focusing on getting back to the big part of the field and being himself. And (you see) how many balls he hits hard. He knows when he's good is when he's a gap-to-gap, line-drive guy.'
Machado has been that guy from the beginning. On Aug. 9, 2012, he skipped over Triple A and landed in a playoff chase with the Baltimore Orioles. In his second at-bat, the then-20-year-old laced a triple into the right-center gap for his first career hit.
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In time, Machado grew into his frame and turned consistent doubles power into 30-homer seasons. He won a Platinum Glove in 2013 and settled in as one of the finest defenders of his generation. After two knee surgeries cost him time early in his career, he demonstrated what would become another defining quality.
Since 2015, Machado has started more big-league games than anyone else. His only trip to the injured list over the past decade came in 2023, when a fractured hand forced him to miss two weeks. His durability reminds Los Angeles Angels manager Ron Washington of Adrian Beltré, the third-base contemporary Machado most admired until Beltré retired in 2018.
'Injuries never stopped Adrian Beltré from playing,' said Washington, who managed Beltré for four seasons with the Texas Rangers. 'Adrian Beltré made other people want to be everyday players. There's a lot of guys that couldn't play every day, but because they were around Adrian Beltré, they'd think they could play every day.
'That's the kind of player that Manny Machado is. He makes everybody else want to come on the field and play.'
As the games have piled up, so have the hits. Machado reached the 1,500-hit mark in 2022, becoming the sixth third baseman to cross that threshold by age 29 — and the first since Beltré in 2008. He has batted at least .275 in every season since his rookie campaign, and his gap-to-gap approach holds up in offense-suppressing venues. Since he first signed with San Diego in 2019, Machado has hit .275 at Petco Park and .281 elsewhere. This season, that split is .287 and .345, respectively.
Given their ongoing performance, Machado and Freeman, the Los Angeles Dodgers' metronome of a first baseman, appear to be the safest current picks to eclipse 3,000 hits. Both players have supplied all-fields production in eerily similar fashion. Since the Statcast era began in 2015, Machado's batted-ball profile breaks down as follows: 37.2 percent to the pull side, 37.4 percent up the middle and 25.2 percent to the opposite field. Freeman, who at age 35 is leading the National League in batting average, has logged identical percentages — down to the decimal point — in each direction.
'Manny and Freddie, they came from a different era with a different philosophy and a different skill set on how to approach hitting, and they've been able to survive,' Shildt said. 'And yeah, their talent's extraordinary, but it's not so extraordinary that other people can't follow it. But the industry, including the amateur level, is tripled up where you're just devaluing the hit. It's not valued as highly.
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'I followed this trend as soon as we started to get into more of the pull approach, pull-the-ball-in-the-air, three-outcome game,' Shildt said. 'Just every year, and I started tracking that in 2010 and started to see the decrease in average versus increase in strikeouts versus just pure number of hits. And it was stark. As far as the number of guys who get to 2,000 versus 3,000, it's going to become even more stark.'
A little more than three years have passed since Miguel Cabrera, an all-fields slugger Machado studied closely, became the 33rd and most recent player to enter the 3,000-hit club. Freeman and Altuve, with perhaps a handful more seasons, could approach elite territory around their 40th birthdays — an age that tends to bring plummeting effectiveness.
Even Machado is far from a guarantee. Of the 10 players this century to reach 2,000 hits by age 32, five — Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Beltré, Albert Pujols and Cabrera — went on to attain 3,000. Roberto Alomar, Ken Griffey Jr., Ivan Rodriguez, Edgar Renteria and Robinson Canó did not.
'There aren't a lot of guys that are going to get to that mark after (Freeman, Altuve and Machado potentially do),' said Padres shortstop Xander Bogaerts, one of 10 active players with at least 1,700 hits. 'There's going to be a new threshold pretty much.'
Rodriguez, who worked as Cleveland's assistant hitting coach before the Padres hired him, suggested that 2,500 hits would be enough to earn Guardians third baseman José Ramírez entry into the Hall of Fame. (Ramírez, 32, has 1,574.) Washington, whose career in professional baseball began in 1970, said he could envision a world in which Machado winds up being the final player to amass 3,000 hits.
'It might not happen again,' Washington said.
'It's not the pitching. It's the players. There's a handful of Merrills,' Washington said, referring to Jackson Merrill, the Padres center fielder who batted .292 as a rookie. 'That's where (Kansas City Royals shortstop) Bobby Witt Jr. fits in. There's a handful of guys. The rest of them, they're not pure hitters. You need pure hitters to reach that.'
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Future applicants will also need the kind of longevity Machado is tracking toward. Twenty-eight of the 33 members of the 3,000-hit club played in at least 20 big-league seasons. Only one, Ichiro Suzuki, arrived in the majors after his 23rd birthday. Twenty-six debuted before turning 22.
Sitting at his locker on a recent afternoon, Machado pointed out that the all-time number of major leaguers — now up to 23,494 — wouldn't quite fill half of Petco Park. He marveled at that fact, as well as his proximity to 297 players who have already crossed a lofty threshold.
'It's going to be pretty cool, man. Obviously, it always takes you back to that first hit. You kind of reflect on (how) that was your childhood dream, to get a hit in the big leagues. And now you're pushing 2,000, which is crazy,' Machado said. 'It's kind of surreal when you think about that number. I mean, it's 2,000 hits.'
He also considered a certain theory. Maybe one day, the likes of Merrill and Witt will have the opportunity to disprove it. Maybe future legislation will help swing the game back in favor of hitters. Maybe, if Machado doesn't manage to do it, someone else will.
Actually, he sounded certain of it.
'Listen, this game has been played for so long, and (3,000-hit careers have) happened, so I'm pretty sure it will continue,' Machado said. 'We're going to be seeing a lot of great players come through the minor leagues and be really good baseball players and break a lot of records.'
Still, as Machado marches toward his 2,000th hit and an even greater milestone, his career already puts him in rare territory. He could end up among the last — if not the very last — of his kind.
(Top photo of Manny Machado: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)