There was only a single batter with 2,000 career hits after the 1952 season: Stan Musial, who had 2,023. But that bottleneck is hardly surprising given that many of baseball’s stars missed multiple seasons due to service in World War II. There were 10 active 1,500-hit hitters that year and six of them (Musial, Johnny Mize, Enos Slaughter, Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, and Mickey Vernon) went to war. Baseball set a record for the most active players with 2,000 hits fairly recently, with 27 after the 2004 season. Right now, there are only five: Cabrera, Robinson Canó, Yadier Molina, Albert Pujols, and Joey Votto.

The 1990s have the well-deserved reputation of being a home run era but people don’t always remember that it was a high batting average era as well. The league’s batting average during that decade peaked at .271 in 1999, the highest figure since 1939. Part of the reason the 90s don’t have a reputation as a batting average-heavy era is that you didn’t see many players flirting with the .400 mark, especially compared to the last time league batting averages had gone that high. Except for the occasional small uptick — including all of the expansion years — the spread of batting average among hitters has become narrower over time:

That weird outlier blip in 2020 is, naturally, due to the 60-game season. Now, if the decline in league batting average was just due to a less talented pool of hitters, we’d expect there to be more dispersion, not less. Unless league offense changes, ZiPS projects only a single active player, Cabrera, to finish his career past the .300 mark.

So, when will we see another player get 3,000 hits once Cabrera does? None of the other players with 2,000 hits are great candidates. Canó needs two full excellent seasons or three full middling ones to get to 3,000, a tall order for a player who will be 39 and coming off a year-long PED suspension. Last month, Molina announced that he plans to retire after the 2022 season and it seems rather unlikely he’ll get the 900 hits he needs before then. Votto’s had a terrific 2021, but with a thousand hits to go, the calendar is likely too daunting.

Miguel Cabrera is now a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in baseball.

Cabrera put an exclamation point on his career when he became the 28th member of the 500 home run club with a sixth-inning blast for the Detroit Tigers on Sunday against the Blue Jays in Toronto.

The 38-year-old Cabrera connected on a 1-1 pitch from left-hander Steven Matz, sending the ball over the scoreboard in right-center field. The 400-foot homer tied the score at 1. The Tigers won the game 5-3 in 11 innings.

The 14,685 fans at Rogers Centre rose for a standing ovation as Cabrera rounded the bases. After celebrating with his teammates, the Tigers slugger came out of the dugout to accept a curtain call, taking off his helmet and bowing to the crowd behind Detroit’s dugout.

“It’s something special for my country, for my family, to be able to do this,’’ he said. “I’m really happy.’‘

The milestones keep piling up for Miguel Cabrera, but his latest feat hits close to home. His fifth-inning RBI single in the Tigers’ 4-2 win on Wednesday night was the 2,878th hit of his MLB career, moving him past Omar Vizquel for 43rd on the all-time Major League list and giving him the most by a Venezuelan-born Major Leaguer.

In a season when every hit seems to be approaching or reaching a milestone, Cabrera admitted this one had been weighing on him for a while.

“I feel like I’m relieved right now,” he said after the game, “because too many people had been talking to me in the offseason, in the past year, and today [that] I’m going to pass this record. That kept in my head. So right now I’m a little relieved I don’t have to worry about that.”

Cabrera already leads all Venezuelan-born Major Leaguers with 489 career home runs, 1,735 RBIs, 1,461 runs scored and 582 doubles. The hits record required him to surpass some incredible contact hitters, including Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio, as well as legendary Venezuelan slugger Andrés Galarraga, a player Cabrera idolized growing up.