As 2023 Comes to a Close, the Number of 2000s Players Continues to Rapidly Decrease

Almost exactly two years ago, I made note of a shocking trend: we were losing 2000s players at an alarming rate. And in the short time since the 2023 season ended, we’ve seen a number of high-profile retirements, which has made me want to look into the matter again.

But first, I wanted to quickly remind everyone of some basics. First, when I refer to “2000s Players”, I’m of course talking about players who debuted between 2000 to 2009, not just “any players who have debuted since 2000”. This topic is kind of a follow-up to something I looked at almost a decade ago, trying to predict who would be the final active player from the 1990s. Once we ran out of 1990s players, it seemed natural to move on to the next decade, so I figured I’d shelve the issue until around 2024 or so.

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Except when Buster Posey announced his surprise retirement back in 2021, I began poking around in Baseball-Reference and realized that the topic was coming up on us much quicker than I ever expected. You see, historically, “The Last Active Player from a Decade” has been shockingly predictable:


Last Player from the 1920s: Satchel Paige made it to 1965 if you count his comeback publicity stunt; if you only count regular players, Paige tied with Bobo Newsom (retired 1953)
Last Player from the 1930s: Early Wynn (1963)
Last Player from the 1940s: Minnie Miñoso (1980) if you count his comeback publicity stunts, otherwise Willie Mays (1973)
Last Player from the 1950s: Jim Kaat (1983)
Last Player from the 1960s: Carlton Fisk and Nolan Ryan (1993)
Last Player from the 1970s: Rickey Henderson and Jesse Orosco (2003)
Last Player from the 1980s: Jamie Moyer and Omar Vizquel (2012)


Maybe it’s just me, but I find that stability hilarious: for six straight decades, the last active player would hang up their cleats exactly 24 years after the decade ended. The 1980s saw that slip to 23 years, which is maybe a little unusual, but ultimately not really a meaningful difference.

…Except that, with the benefit of hindsight, maybe it was a sign of things to come? After all of that, our final 1990s players wound up being Adrián Beltré and Bartolo Colon, who both called it quits* after the 2018 season, or five years early if you go by that 24-year rule.

*Technically, Colon would go play in the Mexican League in 2021, but his MLB days ended in 2018.

And if you were hoping that 2000s players might prove to be a rebound here, you’re probably going to be disappointed; for as aggressive as the last decade was at pushing 1990s players out of the league, things are only looking worse for 2000s players this decade. In fact, we’ve generally been a year ahead of the already-accelerated schedule that decade was on:

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2023 Edition (Tenth Anniversary!)

Once again, we’re at the point in the offseason where I predict active players’ chances at making the Hall of Fame. And even more notably, this year marks the tenth anniversary of my first entry in the series, from all the way back in 2013! It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it has.

And I guess part of the reason it doesn’t feel that long is that the Hall of Fame kind of moves at a glacial pace. For example, the youngest stars I wrote about back in 2013? They’re entering their age 30 season this year (and they’ve posted a remarkable track record in that time, but more on that later!). In fact, very few of the players from my first article have even reached a Hall ballot, since I only covered players 30 and under in that entry.

A number of those players have retired, sure (not all of them, though!), but it kind of serves as a real-time demonstration of how dramatically slow the Hall’s process is; you need to play for at least ten seasons (so even the 2013 thirty-year-olds likely needed a few more years to be eligible), then you need to wait five seasons after retiring, then you can finally be considered in that sixth year. I think the only names from those first articles to appear on the BBWAA ballot so far are Prince Fielder and Carl Crawford; how long has it been since you’ve thought about either of them?* You get a few more if you expand it the 2014 article, since I raised the bar to 35 that year, but on the other hand, that one also included Albert Pujols, who was of course so young that he was an All-Star as recently as last year!

*Side note that I just had to drop somewhere: I casually glanced at Crawford’s Wikipedia page to see what he’d been doing since retirement, and it is a lot to take in. The high points include things like his son going in the first round of the draft last year, and the record label he founded signing hip-hop superstar Megan Thee Stallion. The low points include a lot of violence and getting sued by Megan over that contract. I was expecting maybe one or two small notes, not all of that. Fielder didn’t even get a post-career section on his page, and he had a cooking show!

Anyway, with all of the sentimental stuff out of the way, let’s do a quick refresher of the method I use here. First, I take every Hall of Fame position player, and look at all of their career Wins Above Replacement totals (Baseball-Reference version) at each age. Then, I take the median for each year, to form a sort of “Median Hall of Famer Pace” to follow. From there, I look at how many players in history have been above the pace at each age, Hall member or not. I get the percentages for each age from just doing a simple calculation, (Number of Hall of Famers above the median pace) divided by (Total number of players above the median pace).

So (to make up an example with fake numbers), if there were 100 Hall of Famers, and their median WAR at age 30 was 40.0 Wins, then I’d look at how many players in history had 40.0+ WAR by the same age. Say it was 100 players total, with 50 of them being in the Hall, we’d say players with over 40.0 WAR at that age have a 50% chance of induction. Also, I group players by their listed age the previous season, so players in the age 20 group will be playing in their age 21 season in 2023.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. Otherwise, let’s jump right in:

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Age 20: 0.4 WAR Median; 23.91% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players:
None

There just really weren’t that many 20-year-old position players in the league last year. Only Francisco Álvarez and Ezequiel Tovar saw any playing time at all, totalling just 14 games and 49 plate appearances between them. That might sound normal, but it’s actually a little surprising, since the low WAR total helps offset the small player pool; in fact, 2022 is the first full season (so excluding 2020) since 2017 that we haven’t had an active 20-year-old who made it to the Hall median for the age!

Age 21: 2.0 WAR Median; 35.76% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players:
Julio Rodriguez (6.2 WAR)
Wander Franco (6.1 WAR)
Michael Harris II (5.3 WAR)

In contrast with the Age 20 bracket, Age 21 is already packed with over-the-line players. We of course have our two reigning Rookies of the Year in Rodriguez and Harris, plus Franco, who makes it despite really only having two half-seasons under his belt so far. And even that set is only scratching the surface here.

After them, you also have a pair of former first-round picks in Riley Greene and Corbin Carrol, who made it over halfway to 2.0 Wins in under 100 games (1.4 and 1.2, respectively), plus Gunnar Henderson (0.9) and Vaughn Grissom (0.8) just missing the halfway point despite neither hitting a major league roster until August (in fact, Henderson still maintains his Rookie status for 2023!). Given that the median bar is still fairly low for age-22 players, don’t be surprised if this age group has five or six names over the line when the next edition of the series rolls around.

The Future of the 3000 Hit Club, 2021 Edition

Last time, I used Miguel Cabrera’s various milestone bids to investigate which younger players might one day be making their own attempts at 500 home runs. While Miggy is much closer to that mark, he’s also within spitting distance of the other big offensive milestone, 3000 hits. So today, let’s apply those methods once again to look at who might one day be approaching that other mark.

As a quick catch-up, we’re essentially looking at how many hits each member of the 3000 Hit Club had at each age, compared to how many non-3000 Hit players matched them at those ages, to determine a current player’s chance of one day joining the former group. If you want a more specific example of this, feel free to refer to the last article. Also, as mentioned last time, Baseball-Reference changed their search feature since the last time I looked at this, so for now, I’m stuck reusing my numbers from a few years ago (although the actual values likely haven’t changed much in the years since, for what it’s worth).

With that out of the way, let’s dive in!



Age 22 Median: 323 Hits, 14.16% of players go on to 3000 hits
Age 22 Third Quartile: 118 Hits, 4.01% of players go on to 3000 hits

It doesn’t necessarily mean a lot at this age, but Juan Soto is already pretty far ahead of the 3000 club median, with 361 hits to his name, and that total will only increase in the coming months. And while it’s not the most meaningful milestone, it’s also true that a 14% chance isn’t anything to sneeze at either, especially for players this young! Elsewhere in the league, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (238) and Fernando Tatis Jr. (202) are also above the third quartile mark already, and while Tatis is a bit of a stretch, Vlad could definitely still pass the median before the season is over. Dylan Carlson (66) also has a decent chance to reach the third quartile milestone this year.

The Future of the 500 Home Run Club, 2021 Edition

We are very close to some upcoming batting milestones, and both of them are from the same person. Miguel Cabrera has had a very slow start in 2021, but with 489 home runs, 2881 hits, and at least two and half years under contract on a Tigers team that doesn’t expect to be competing any time soon, it seems safe to assume he’ll be given every opportunity to become the seventh member of the 3000 hit-500 homer club. He may even reach both of them this year, although it would take a bit of a rebound to pick up 119 more hits this year.

As is the case when big milestones are imminent, I’ve seen people speculating about future members of the club, and a surprising number of them seem pessimistic about the future of both clubs. I could understand that about the 300 win club, but not either of the batting milestones. Sure, there aren’t many players on the immediate horizon, but both clubs have gone through lulls in new members before. You just have to be willing to look into the future a bit.

Which is something I’ve done before! So I figured, it’s been a few years, why not update those numbers a little and look at how active players’ paces match up to the members of the club? For those who aren’t familiar with the last article, I used a process similar to my yearly Future Hall of Famer piece. I start by looking at how many homers each member of the 500 club had at each age, and marking the median totals (as well as a few others, like the first and third quartiles, and the lowest and second-lowest totals). Then, I see how many retired players in those ranges fell short, which allows me to see the percentage of that group that went on to make 500 homers.

(To use made-up numbers for an example, say one quarter of the 500 club, or 7 players, had 100 homers by age 23, and half of the club had 50. If 10 players in history had 100 homers by that age, and 7 went on to 500 home runs overall, our odds for players with 100 homers by age 23 are 7 in 10, or 70%. And if 14 players fell between 50 and 99 homers, and 7 of those are the ones who went on to 500, then the odds for players in that quartile are 7 in 14, or 50%.)

This should be a much better way to visualize which players are actually on-pace than basic active leaderboards (take, for instance, Robinson Cano, who is fourth place among active players with 334 dingers, but is also 38 years old and has roughly zero chance to stick around for another 166). Unfortunately, I couldn’t update my figures from last time due to changes to Baseball-Reference’s search tools, but these numbers are an estimate anyway, so they should be good enough for our purposes.

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2020 Edition

[Also up over at The Crawfish Boxes!]

As you may know by now, I’m especially interested in the Hall of Fame. And one of my favorite offseason activities, in the period between the official Hall of Fame election and pitchers and catchers reporting for a new season, is to merge the modern and the historic and look at the active players who, entering the season, are on pace for Cooperstown. I’ve been at it for several years now, in fact.

It’s a pretty simple system, running primarily on Baseball-Reference’s Wins Above Replacement across ages. And it’s more descriptive than predictive, reflecting who’s already been elected rather than who should be but was snubbed, or whether the Hall should be bigger, or how much newer issues like steroids will affect the vote.

But it’s a good activity for the slow end-of-winter days, and unlike some other methods, it usually returns a reasonable number of players given what we know (Bill James’s estimate years ago is that there are usually around 40 active future Hall of Famers in a given season, and I’m usually a little over that but with some regression expected), and they’re actually fairly spread out across ages rather than clustered at the end (that 40 active players total doesn’t differentiate between players just starting and those nearing the end). And if nothing else, it gives you an idea of what a reasonable career path to Cooperstown looks like?

So what is the method I use, exactly? I basically look at each player inducted (divided by position player or pitcher, since the standards are different), then look at their spread of WAR by age. I pick the Median; and from there, look at how many total players in history have matched or bettered that total by that age (excluding players who are still active, not yet eligible, or still on the ballot, since their fates are still up in the air), then look at what percentage of that group eventually went on to Cooperstown.

See, not too complicated! So, with that out of the way, who all currently is above the Hall of Fame median WAR for their age? Players are grouped by their age from the 2019 season.

What Have the Marlins Gotten Back from All of Their Trades?

ESPN noted that, following the J.T. Realmuto trade, 23 of the Marlins’ top 25 players by WAR have been traded, rather than leaving as a free agent or eventually retiring with the team. It’s a pretty sorry affair after 27 seasons, but I wondered if maybe they had at least gotten back prospects to rebuild the team over the years. This isn’t necessarily to see how the trades looked at the time, just to see the eventual outcomes. So let’s take a quick look at the returns for the 23 players sent away.

Predicting the Future of the 3000 Hit Club, 2018 Edition

For the fourth year in a row, a player has reached the 3000 hit plateau. Albert Pujols, following Alex Rodriguez in 2015, Ichiro Suzuki in 2016, and Adrian Beltre last year, finally crossed the mark to become the fourth member of the 3000 Hit/600 home run club.

In honor of the occasion, I decided to update something I did back when A-Rod passed the milestone: which other active players have a shot at 3000? It’s a variation on my yearly predictions of which players have the best chances to make the Hall of Fame; I look at the median point of 3000 Hit Club members at each age throughout their careers, then look at how many players historically had that same total of hits or greater, then take a simple percentage to get rough odds of a players’ chances to hold on the rest of the way. For this one, I also did the same thing for the third quartile mark.

I took these measures from age 22 all the way to age 39 to get a full picture of the progression for an average 3000 Hit Club member. It takes an early start (28 of the 32 players to reach the mark debuted at age 22 or younger*) and some amazing peak years, but also good health and longevity; twelve players reached 3000 hits in their age 39 season, and another nine made it even later than that. That’s the type of rarified air we’re dealing with. As such, the odds of players making it are much lower than the ones I get for predicting future Hall of Famers (given that there are a couple hundred in Cooperstown already).

*Paul Waner and Honus Wagner debuted at 23, and Wade Boggs debuted at 24. Ichiro, being a freak of nature, pulled it off despite not playing in the majors until his age 27 season.

So, what does the current crop of talent look like?

Who Are the Hall of Famers Playing Today, If We Adjust for Size?

With the Hall of Fame induction over the past weekend, I’ve had a few ideas for related articles lately. Let’s start with the most directly-related idea.

I saw an interesting article over at Sporting News recently from Hall of Fame expert Graham Womack. If you aren’t already familiar with his work, you may still recognize his name from the “50 Best Players Not in the Hall of Fame” Project that I frequently participate in. In any case, he ran a piece recently looking at how many active players today might one day make it to Cooperstown.

It actually reminded me of something I wrote several years ago, and even though we took slightly different approaches, we wound up with similar conclusions: the Hall of Fame, as is, is just too small. And not just that, but we even wound up with similar numbers for our numbers too: while we’re seeing a little under 40 active players per season making the Hall, based on the precedent, it should probably be a little over 50 at least, possibly even as much as 75 (although we both agreed that end of the spectrum seemed a little too high).

It’s nice to see someone else who knows what they’re talking about come to that conclusion. And I figured it could be a good opportunity to run an update on my subsequent articles on the matter, where I tried to demonstrate how a Hall of this size would look transposed onto modern times (using both 2012 and 2006; you can find all of those pieces on this page under “Series 2”). It’s been five years, and the Hall of Fame induction ceremony was on Sunday* after all, so this is extra timely!

*Also, six months later, it’s still hard for me to believe Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines , and Ivan Rodriguez all got in this year, let alone that two more players missed by less than 20 votes.

So, what would 40/50/60/70+ active players making the Hall of Fame look like in todays game? Which players would we be looking at?

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2017 Edition

This year is the fifth anniversary of my annual “Predicting Future Hall of Famers” project (see the past four years here), so I don’t know how much of an introduction is necessary. Let’s just jump right into the methodology refresher so that we can move on to the active players on pace, shall we?

Basically, I’m looking at how the Hall’s elected players (hitters today, pitchers next) have historically looked at each age en route to their eventual election into the Hall of Fame. I use Wins Above Replacement (Baseball-Reference’s version, for the sake of research) due to its high correlation to Hall election, and look at how each hitter looked, career-total-wise, each year. I pick out the median as a baseline, then look at what percentage of players with the median WAR at that age eventually got into the Hall.

To put concrete numbers on this, say that there were 99 hiters in the Hall of Fame, and the 50th most WAR at the age of 28 was 30. I would then see how many total players in history had 30 WAR at 28, then take a percentage of players in the Hall out of total players (removing players still on the ballot or not yet eligible, as their status is still up in the air). So if there were 100 players with 30 WAR at 28, we’d say there was a 50% chance of a player at the Hall median for WAR at age 28 eventually getting elected. It’s a little simple and crude, but it’s a good visualization of how historic Hall of Fame careers have looked.

And of course, the standard disclaimers: this is based entirely on precedent, which is a fickle thing in Hall voting. Good, deserving players get snubbed all the time from Cooperstown. Other times they have to wait years before the Veterans Committee before they get in. On the flip side, by definition, half of the players in the Hall of Fame were below the median, so not hitting the mark is not a death sentence for their eventual enshrinement. This is just to pick out the strongest cases and assign rough odds.

Good, now, with all that out of the way, let’s see who all is absolutely, totally, 100% going to get elected on the first ballot 20 years from now:

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2016 Edition

It’s long been a tradition here at Hot Corner Harbor to look at which active players might be on pace for the Hall of Fame. I’ve been busy with various things the past few months, but I really wanted to do my yearly update to the series before the 2016 season got under way. To keep it simple, I’m going to reuse my numbers from last year and give a quick refresher on my system; feel free to check previous year’s editions if you want a more in-depth explanation.

Essentially, I’m looking at how many Wins Above Replacement (Baseball-Reference version) all Hall of Fame hitters had accumulated at each age and picked the median. Then, to give some context, I found what percentage of players at that mark or higher went on to be inducted into Cooperstown (accounting for players still on the ballot and such). This isn’t to say these players will or won’t make Cooperstown; by definition, half of all Hall of Famers didn’t. And hitting these marks is no guarantee; players may drop off, or they may not and Hall voters may not choose to recognize them anyway. This is just to get a rough guide to what a Hall of Fame career might look like, and to see who is on pace.

Predicting the Future of the 500 Home Run Club

After looking at the future of the 3000 hit club last month, I began wanting to try my method out with other milestones. The natural next step was the other big milestone for hitters, 500 home runs. Would there be any difference in how early we could predict who would make each club? The Hall of Fame induction ceremony seemed like as good an excuse as any to look at a milestone like this (even if it was three 3000 strikeout guys and a 3000 hit guy getting inducted this year).

A quick refresher on the methodology: first, I went through the 26 members of the 500 home run club and looked at how many home runs they had at each age. I sorted them by totals, then split the club into the upper half and lower half. Next, I looked at how many hitters throughout history had more home runs than the lower half at the same age. Then, I just took a simple percentage of (upper half of the club) divided by (total number of retired hitters who had more homers than the lower half of the club at the same age). I expanded on what I did for the 3000 hit article, though; rather than just do the halfway point, the lowest, and the second lowest, I threw in the quartiles (the halfway marks of the halves). That way, I could estimate the odds for players above 25% and 75% of the 500 homer club.

In each grouping, I took out the players in the quartile above, so that I'm not double counting, say, the guys in the top quartile as in the second quartile as well even though they are above the mark needed to be in that group. This is to give a more accurate sense of how likely players in that quartile specifically are to reach the 500 mark; using the player with the most homers at that age to predict someone just over the halfway point seemed a little silly. This leads to a little fluctuation in the results (sometimes, the second quartile will have fewer players eventually making 500 home runs than the third quartile, for instance), but usually, the variations aren’t too significant.

These odds aren’t going to be super-precise for a variety of reasons; this is a very rough model, the game has evolved dramatically since when some of these players played, I’m not really weighting each player by where they are individually, and so on. However, I think it gives us a pretty good rough idea; it may be off, but it gives us a tangible, easy to visualize predictor for something that’s normally pretty difficult to predict. As an aside, I’d caution against using the “Lowest” number as a hard guideline, since that player was almost always an outlier; sticking to the “Second Lowest” benchmark and above should be more indicative. So, with that in mind, which modern players are on pace for 500 home runs?