An update on Jose Altuve’s career hits totals.

With his two hits last night vs. the White Sux, Jose Altuve has reached 2136 career hits, passing Joey Votto, Maury Wills, Don Baylor, and Astros legend Moises Alou for 217th place on the all time hits leaderboard. He trails only Freddie Freeman (2197) among active players.

Altuve is on pace for 195 hits this season, which would put him at 2242 career, good for 175th place all time. This season, we should see him pass some amazing players such as Ken Griffey Sr., Astros coaching legend Yogi Berra, Yadier Molina, Joe Carter, Willie McCovey, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Stargell, and Mike Schmidt.

Will he get to 3000 hits?
At age 34, Altuve will hopefully have several more years to increase his totals. Unfortunately injuries and Covid over the past few years have eaten into his chances a bit. I estimate that since 2018, he's missed out on roughly 200 games, or roughly 245 total hits. Let's make the assumption that he'll be relatively healthy going forward, and that we won't have a Bird Flu outbreak or an apocalyptic war against some AI chat bot gone haywire. We'll assume 150 games per season for the next 6 seasons. Altuve isn't showing any major signs of slowing down, so let's be optimistic and guess that for the first 3 seasons he'll get 185 hits per season and for the next 3 seasons, 160 hits per season. That means another 1035 hits, putting him at 3171 for his career.

So, assuming a graceful decline and good health, Altuve should get there.

What does Altuve have to do to break Pete Rose's all time record?
Ready for your crazy stat of the day? Altuve just got halfway to Pete Rose's record of 4256 ten days ago. I don't think there's a reasonable chance that he can break this record. But one thing I know about this subreddit, is that we're unreasonable people (just ask r/baseball), so let's be crazy here…

Altuve defies Father Time and gets 200 hits per season until he gets bored with winning batting titles and World Series rings. He would need to play 10.6 more seasons, when on his 45th birthday, May 6, 2035, he hits an eighth inning bases loaded double off Livvy's boyfriend, scoring three runs and putting the Astros up 6-4 over the San Antonio Sidewinders.

Pete Rose played until he was 46, I'm just sayin'.