Future of the 500 Home Run Club

So, the last few weeks, I’ve been writing a lot about the 500 home run club and what direction it’s heading in. This seems like only a natural conclusion to that train of thought. My first article ever focused on the 300 Win Club, going down each age and seeing who was closest to joining the club. That sounds like solid enough thinking, so I’m going back to that. (Sorry if some of these numbers are slightly off; this was written over a span of time, so some of the stats are from earlier in the week).

Will the 500 Home Run Club Go Inactive for a While?

So, my last piece on Paul Konerko and 500 home runs got me thinking about the future of the 500 home run club. I know how the club expanded to the point where a lot of people have said that no one will care about 500 home runs anymore. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true; people are unpredictable, as are the Hall of Fame voters (see, it’s funny because I implied they aren’t also people). Maybe 500 home runs will continue to stand as a testament to power, maybe it won’t. I think it will for at least a little longer because a) the next round number up is 600, and not enough people have reached it yet (and let’s be honest, people are lazy; we aren’t making a 550 home run club to tide ourselves over); and b) baseball has a connection to its past, more than any other sport. Of the eight 600 home run players, five of them achieved it after 2000. That group just seems like too recent a group for most fans to just accept as historic. We can’t even get everyone to agree on using replay, there’s no way we’ll get a unanimous consensus on the superiority of something modern.