More batters likely to join, but not this year.
On May 4, in the fifth inning of a game at Safeco Field against the Seattle Mariners, Albert Pujols flared a single into right field, a common act freighted with uncommon meaning. Teammates streamed from the visitors dugout and mobbed him in the infield, a celebration of his 3,000th hit. The game stopped, in a visiting park, to recognize Pujols.
The milestone continued a relative spate of 3,000. Each of the past four seasons — starting with Alex Rodriguez in 2015, followed by Ichiro Suzuki, Adrian Beltre and Pujols — have seen a player reach the plateau, the first time in baseball history players reached 3,000 hits in four consecutive years. The 3,000th has become an annual sight. It will not remain so for long.
The hit, for so long a simple standard of batting prowess and the game’s primary point of action, has taken a beating. The dominant trends in how Major League baseball is played — an emphasis on power and patience, infield shifts on defense, high-octane relief pitchers, exploding strikeout totals — have both devalued and decreased hits. The league recorded 1,757 more hits — including 2,276 more singles — a decade ago than last season. This year, MLB hitters have nearly 500 more strikeouts than hits.
The increase in whiffs and plummeting of hits has raised questions about the game’s future, convincing the league office to discuss limiting shifts or altering how teams are permitted to deploy relief pitchers. The trends also invite the possibility of a generational wrinkle: Will the changes in approach by — and evaluation of — hitters lead to the endangerment of the 3,000hit career, in the same way the evolution of pitching made the 300-win career extinct? And will the meaning of 3,000 hits evolve with the game?
For certain, there will not be a fifth consecutive season with a 3,000th hit next year. Miguel Cabrera, the sub-3,000 active leader, sits 324 hits away. Cabrera seems like a safe bet to reach 3,000, but it’s no lock after the way his 2018 season ended, with surgery to repair a torn biceps. He has five years remaining on his contract with the Detroit Tigers after this season, and his skills as a hitter are so sublime that they will likely be willing to play him even as age erodes them. But he is 35 with the mileage of a player even older and will be coming off a significant injury.
After Cabrera, the closest to 3,000 hits is Robinson Cano. He needs 583 hits to reach 3,000, and the Mariners have him under contract through 2023, but like Cabrera, his situation is murkier than simple math. Cano, 35, was suspended 80 games this season for using performance-enhancing drugs. Unlike most aging stars, the suspension may rob him of the goodwill needed to allow him to hang on to a roster spot long enough to reach 3,000, and it’s unknown how much pharmacology helped his production in the first place.
If Cabrera and Cano cannot reach 3,000, then the wait could be long. Nick Markakis is next up, with 2,144 hits. He’s having his best offensive season at age 34, having already compiled a National League-leading 93 hits entering the weekend series against Baltimore. He is one of MLB’s most durable players and his defense is good enough to keep him in the lineup even if his offensive skills decline.
Bill James, the godfather of modern statistical analysis, used Markakis as an example to counter the notion that 3,000-hit careers are in trouble.
“We’re kind of at a moment when most of the stars of the game are younger, and not yet in position to be seen as 3,000-hit candidates,” James wrote in an email. “But the conditions of the game are such that even a relatively modest talent like Markakis ... Nick Markakis is a good player, but not what we usually think of as a 3,000-hit type player ... but the conditions of the game now are SO favorable toward 3,000-hit campaigns that even a player like that remains alive as a 3,000-hit candidate until late in his career. Conditions for a 3,000-hit career have rarely or never been as favorable as they are now.”
But for Markakis to reach 3,000, he would also have to reverse another emerging trend: The squeezing out of the late-30s veteran hitter. If Markakis averages 171 hits — his average over the past five seasons — over his next five years, he’d reach 3,000 in his age-39 season. A free agent this winter, Markakis would likely need to sign two more contracts to make it. The second deal no longer seems a given after this winter revealed a new, extreme unwillingness among front offices to sign veteran hitters.
Superstars from a different generation benefited from a different outlook toward mega-contracts for veterans. Pujols, 38, might have struggled to find work this offseason had he been a free agent after producing a .672 OPS and -1.8 WAR in 2017. Instead, he is in the middle of a 10-year, $240 million deal that runs through 2021, leaving the Angels with little choice but to try to salvage their investment. The Angels paid for past performance when they signed Pujols, and the contract he earned from his peak left no doubt he’d reach 3,000 hits. Those kind of deals, combined with improved conditioning and medical care, created the conditions for four of baseball’s 32 3,000th hits to happen in the past four seasons.
“The different salary structure in baseball will have tended to keep star performers on the field longer,” MLB official historian John Thorn said.
Thorn predicted “you may hit a lag” with 3,000-hit players, “but I think the long-term trend is for another burst of 3,000-hit players” despite the modern forces working against the hit.
Jose Altuve, 28, is 1,648 hits away, and if he stays on his 204-hits-per-season pace from the past five years, he’d reach 3,000 at age 36, in the middle of the 2026 season. Mike Trout, just 26, already has 1,176 hits.
In the lean years of Icelandic soccer, roughly defined as the years before 2011, it was hard to get anyone excited about the national team. Icelanders tend to be phlegmatic. Their idea of an anti-government riot is getting together and throwing yogurt at the Parliament building.
The soccer team’s terrible record did not help, even on the rare occasions when things went from bad to less bad. Arni Thor Gunnarsson, a longtime fan, remembers a match with Germany in 2003 that ended in a 0-0 tie — a miracle in a season in which Iceland eked out a single win, against the Faeroe Islands.
Gunnarsson was thrilled, but his fervor was drowned out by the sound of 7,000 fans not cheering in Reykjavik’s stadium.
“I was standing up and yelling and trying to get people involved,” he said recently. “One guy said: ‘Can you sit down and not make so much noise? We’re trying to watch the game here.’”
How that changed — how a few outliers in plastic Viking helmets chanting by themselves amid a sea of lassitude grew into a thousands-strong force of cheering, singing, thunder-clapping Nordic people with near-South American levels of enthusiasm — is also a story of how a nation’s view of itself, and possibly the world’s view of it, has changed in the last half-dozen years.
Iceland is the smallest country by population ever to qualify for the World Cup. The team, which pulled off an elegant 1-1 tie against Lionel Messi (and some other people from Argentina) last week and lost 2-0 to Nigeria in the group stage here Friday, is strong, disciplined and hard to rattle. It is also unusually close to its fans.
“Everyone in the whole country feels like a participant,” the national team’s goalkeeper, Hannes Halldorsson, said recently.
In a country of fewer than 350,000 people, most everybody either knows someone on the team or knows someone who does. There is no celebrity culture. Sports stars are not insulated from the public and do not have to be rescued from scandals by crisis managers.
One of the team’s starting defenders, Birkir Saevarsson, who plays for Valur in the Icelandic league, also has a day job, packing salt in a Reykjavik factory. Soccer is great, but it is not real life, he told a reporter recently, and he likes to keep busy in his downtime. “I didn’t want to get lazy before the World Cup,” he said.
Even the biggest stars on the team, like Gylfi Sigurdsson, a midfielder who plays for Everton in the English Premier League, seem to lead un-starry lives.
“If they’re here, you run into them in the street,” said Kristinn Hallur Jonsson, the secretary of the supporters group that is called Tolfan, or 12th man, the idea being that the fans are an invisible extra member of the lineup. “I’ve seen them walking around. It’s Iceland. It doesn’t matter if it’s Bjork or them — you see everyone.”
The fan group was virtually moribund when Heimir Hallgrimsson, now Iceland’s head coach and then the assistant, started his famous practice of meeting fans at a local pub to unveil his strategy before home games. The news media was barred, enhancing the sense of occasion.
The first such meeting, before a match in 2012 against the Faeroe Islands, once one of Iceland’s main competitors, has achieved the mythic “I was there” significance of the Sex Pistols’ seminal appearance in Manchester in 1976. Even bona fide participants can’t settle on how many people attended: 7, 15, 20?
But as Hallgrimsson told them, “It doesn’t matter if we have one person in the room or 1,000 people in the room — we’re all in this together.”
The meeting had a galvanizing force. “It really molded and validated the supporters’ culture,” Jonsson said. The coach encouraged them to be bigger, bolder, louder.
“He was basically motivating the supporters to do more, to bring more support into the stadium so that the players would feel the atmosphere,” Jonsson said. “He gave us a little ownership, a sense that there is no football without the fans.”
Iceland’s fan culture may be louder and more raucous than it used to be, but it is still peculiarly Icelandic. There is no tradition of hooliganism. “We call ourselves Ruligans — follow the rules,” said Sveinn Asgeirsson, Tolfan’s vice president. If fans start using ugly chants, such as the one encouraging an injured opponent to “go home in a body bag,” they are ignored and isolated until the chants fizzle out.
“I do not feel it is fair to wish somebody dead,” Gunnarsson said.
When their team loses, Iceland’s fans might feel devastated, but they do not feel angry at the world or filled with fury at the players who have made mistakes. So far, it has been enough for them that Iceland has gone this far — first to the 2016 European Championship, where it reached the quarterfinals before losing to France, and now to the World Cup.
“When you keep defeating the odds, you can’t be too angry,” said Cristian DeFrancia, an American lawyer who lives in Vienna and is a passionate Iceland fan. “We’ve come so far.”
Drinking is another thing that seems to set the country apart. Drunken Icelandic fans are not likely to, say, break things, light stuff on fire or attack other fans. “The worst-case scenario is they pass out somewhere and miss the game,” Asgeirsson said.
“Soccer has unified the nation like nothing else,” Iceland’s ambassador to Russia, Berglind Asgeirsdottir, said the other day. She was wearing an Iceland jersey and hanging out with some fans in a Moscow pub.