Watching the Sox/Dodgers on ESPN. Can A-Rod and Jessica STFU!
I thought the booth with Aaron Boone and Jessica Mendoza was really good. When Mr. J-Lo showed up, it became unbearable (even though I like Matt Vasgersian). The most annoying thing was that they had a whole row of Green Monster seats going to waste for J-Lo and kid.
So I'm watching the Angels/M's game tonight (because the Sox are getting their ass kicked) and Pujols comes up and the graphic says that
he is 18th on the all time hit list. At #17 is someone called Paul Waner.
Now I am 50 years old, and have followed baseball pretty damn closely for 40 of those years. I don't think I have ever heard of Paul Waner.
I know who he is, but I'm really big into baseball history. For obvious reasons, he doesn't get the pub of his contemporaries, Ruth, Gehrig, Greenberg, etc.
The interesting thing about the all-time hits list for me is that there are on seven "active" players with more than 2,000 hits (I have "active" in quotation marks because Jose Reyes, Matt Holliday and Brandon Phillips are still listed as active despite being unlikely ever to play another MLB game).
Pujols has 3,143, Miguel Cabrera has 2,762, Robinson Cano has 2,528, and Nick Markakis has 2,329. Cabrera might make it to 3,000, but Cano and Markakis won't, which means that (other than Cabrera), it'll be the better part of another decade before someone else hits the 3,000 hit mark.
The top five guys on the list under age 30 are
Starlin Castro - 1,536
Jose Altuve - 1,483
Eric Hosmer - 1,390
Freddie Freeman - 1,386
Mike Trout - 1,282
All of these guys are 29, except Trout, who's 27; all are in their 9th year, except Freeman, who's in his 10th. I found an article from May 2018 that predicted Altuve will hit the 3,000 hit mark in 2028 and that Trout will do it the following season. Seems reasonable to me.