Manny Machado is on the verge of 2,000 hits. Could he be the last player to reach 3,000?

The San Diego Padres’ star Manny Machado at bat during a divisional series game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Oct. 11, 2022. Machado, who turns 33 next month, is on the doorstep of an increasingly exclusive club. (Kyle Grillot/The New York Times)

By Dennis Lin / The Athletic

One night in April, after another line drive moved him closer to a rare milestone, Manny Machado heard a fellow member of the San Diego Padres raise a theory. Machado, the team’s franchise third baseman, professes to have forgotten who said it. But the idea has stuck in his head.

Maybe it was the fact that the club had just faced the Houston Astros and José Altuve, who reached 2,300 career hits last Wednesday. Maybe it was Machado’s proximity to hit No. 2,000. Maybe, more than anything, it was the audacity of it all.

If Machado were to eventually reach 3,000 hits, could he be the last to ever do it?

“It does sound crazy,” Machado said, “but at the same time, you kind of see how the game is going right now.”

Machado, who turns 33 next month, finds himself on the doorstep of an increasingly exclusive club. There are four active players — Freddie Freeman, Altuve, Andrew McCutchen and Paul Goldschmidt — with at least 2,000 hits. Machado, with only 19 more hits, will make it five. Yet as recently as two decades ago, there were 27 such players.

This downward trend might only be accelerating. Pitchers are pairing unparalleled velocity with a greater understanding of how to manipulate spin and ball flight. The contact hitter is not extinct, but home runs and uppercut swings still drive team success and nine-figure contracts. While extreme shifts are now outlawed, defenses continue to pursue optimal positioning.

“It’s hard to hit the ball,” said Luis Arraez, the Padres’ first baseman and a three-time batting champion.

In 2025, the leaguewide batting average remains under .250 for a sixth consecutive year. If the season were to end today, the average on balls in play would mark a 33-year low. Arraez, 28, who has 915 career hits, secured the National League batting title last year with a mere .314 average. As players in their late 30s, McCutchen and Goldschmidt are long shots to even come close to 3,000 hits. Altuve was once considered a leading candidate, but he is showing signs of decline. Freeman is hitting as well as ever, but, like Altuve, is racing against time.

Machado, meanwhile, has a chance to achieve something none of those decorated veterans did: become the 55th player to record 2,000 hits before age 33. He also has a $350 million contract that runs through 2033 and came with the understanding that he would provide the bulk of his production on the front end.

So far, Machado, a six-time All-Star, has delivered few indications of offensive slippage. He spent much of the last three years playing through tennis elbow and then the lingering effects of reparative surgery. He still completed 2024 as the only active big leaguer to have hit at least 28 home runs in nine consecutive full seasons.

Now, he is batting .320 with a seemingly healthy elbow and some of the best underlying numbers of his career. In a recent 3-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants, he lined an opposite-field single and pulled a two-run drive to become the 33rd player with 350 home runs by age 32. He was 3 for 5 with five runs batted in an 11-1 win against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Tuesday.

“It feels good to just be somewhat normal and be able to get some good swings out and not really be on the training room table every single day,” Machado said.

Mike Shildt, the Padres’ second-year manager, said he was seeing more “consistency and clarity” from Machado.

“I just see a guy that’s really comfortable where he’s at, trusting the guys around him and not making the situation bigger than it is,” Shildt said. “Just putting a good stroke on it, which is one of the best right-handed swings I’ve seen.”

The team’s hitting coach, Victor Rodriguez, added: “He’s healthy. He’s not searching. He’s not trying to feel how he can be comfortable. He’s comfortable. And you see Manny sometimes get out of it, but the next day he’s really focusing on getting back to the big part of the field and being himself.”

Machado has been that guy from the beginning. On Aug. 9, 2012, when he was 20, he skipped over Triple-A and landed in a playoff chase with the Baltimore Orioles. In his second at-bat, he tripled into the right-center gap for his first career hit.

In time, Machado turned consistent doubles power into 30-homer seasons. He won a Platinum Glove in 2013, given to the best overall defensive player in each league, and settled in as one of the finest defenders of his generation. After two knee operations cost him time early in his career, he demonstrated what would become another defining quality.

Since 2015, Machado has started more major league games than anyone else. His only trip to the injured list over the last decade came in 2023, when a fractured hand forced him to miss two weeks. His durability reminds Los Angeles Angels Manager Ron Washington of Adrián Beltré, the third-base contemporary Machado most admired until Beltré retired in 2018.

As the games have piled up, so have the hits. Machado reached 1,500 hits in 2022, becoming the sixth third baseman to cross that threshold by age 29 — and the first since Beltré in 2008. He has batted at least .275 in every season since his rookie campaign, and his gap-to-gap approach holds up in offense-suppressing venues.

Given their continuing performances, Machado and Freeman, the Dodgers’ metronome of a first baseman, appear to be the safest current picks to eclipse 3,000 hits. Both have supplied all-fields production in eerily similar fashion. Since the Statcast era began in 2015, Machado’s batted-ball profile breaks down as follows: 37% to the pull side, 37% up the middle and 25% to the opposite field. The same goes for Freeman, who at 35 is leading the NL in batting average.

“Manny and Freddie, they came from a different era with a different philosophy and a different skill set on how to approach hitting, and they’ve been able to survive,” Shildt said. “And yeah, their talent’s extraordinary, but it’s not so extraordinary that other people can’t follow it. But the industry, including the amateur level, is tripled up where you’re just devaluing the hit. It’s not valued as highly.”

A little more than three years have passed since Miguel Cabrera, an all-fields slugger Machado studied closely, became the 33rd and most recent player to enter the 3,000-hit club. Freeman and Altuve, with perhaps a handful more seasons, could approach elite territory around their 40th birthdays.

Even Machado is far from a guarantee. Of the 10 players this century to reach 2,000 hits by age 32, five — Derek Jeter, Alex Rodríguez, Beltré, Albert Pujols and Cabrera — went on to attain 3,000.