The 500 Home Run Club: Does 500 homers get you in the Hall of Fame?

All statistics via Baseball Reference.

Counting stats have been a mark for the Hall of Fame for as long as we can remember.  But with the new age of advanced metrics, we put a little less stock on stats such as: hits, RBIs, strikeouts, etc.  But one thing still, and will always, play: the home run.

The long ball is one of the most exciting plays in baseball, and our fondest memories and most cherished heroes most of the time coincide with hitting homers.  Take a look at the top home run hitters of all time, and you’ll see a list littered with bold lettering indicating “Hall of Fame”.  Recently, we’ve seen some discord bubble up surrounding how we value putting players into Cooperstown, particularly centered around home run count.  The reason for this is due to the late-season arrival of slugger Giancarlo Stanton.

Giancarlo Stanton (formerly known as Mike Stanton in 2010-11) came into the league with the (then Florida) Marlins back in 2010 at 20 years old.  He’s a big dude, standing at 6’6” and 245lbs.  Stanton came into the league with a bang.  Playing RF and DH in his first 8 years with the Marlins, Giancarlo hit 267 home runs (that’s a HR rate of 6.48%! - more on this later), including his MVP season where he hit a league-leading 59 homers in 2017.  At that rate, it looked like he could smash the 500 career home run total, a near lock to get into the Hall of Fame.

The year following his MVP campaign, he took his talents to the New York Yankees.  In 2018, he hit 38 homers in pinstripes, but 2019 and 2020 were cut short for him to injury, only managing to hit 7 home runs combined.  This also marked his transition to DH-ing the majority of the time, instead of playing in the outfield.  He’s managed to stay relatively healthy in the 4 years after his two short seasons, aside from 2025 when he spent the first half of the year on the IL with (double) elbow tendonitis.  Now, since his return from the IL this year, he’s been mashing baseballs (and playing a little outfield).  He’s slashing .306/.383/.638 for a 1.021 OPS with 16 home runs in only 50 games played and 180 PAs.

So why is all this significant?

Well, with his return to slugging this year, he’s brought his career home run total to 445 (as of 8/25).  That leaves him 55 home runs short of the 500 HR club.  He’s 35 years old now and doesn’t see full-time action due to his injury history and negative defensive value.  But still, aside from his 2019-2020 stretch, he’s never hit less than 22 home runs in a season going back to his debut in 2010, and looks well on the way to beating that again this year.  So, by simple math, he should only need to play 3 more years at the most to hit the 500 mark.

And so he’s in the Hall of Fame, right?  What’s the debate?

Well, it depends on who you ask.  The loudest argument is going to come from WAR, or Wins Above Replacement.  According to Baseball Reference, “WAR is a single number that presents the number of wins the player added to the team above what a replacement player (like a AAA player) would add.”  It’s an extremely advanced way of taking into account everything a player does, like hit, run, field, etc. and giving it a single number.  It’s calculated in a way where I just take everyone’s word for it - I’m not doing the math.  There’s a heuristic out there that says a player needs above 50 WAR to get into the Hall of Fame.  So let’s take a look at the 500 home run club and where their WARs stack up against each other:

As you can see, the player with the lowest WAR is lifetime DH/1B David Ortiz.  Giancarlo Stanton has a cumulative WAR of 46.8 as of now, with declining defense and no baserunning value to add.  He’s still a fearsome hitter, but accumulating those next 3.2 units of WAR will be tough, considering his last three seasons (2022-2024) in terms of WAR look like this: 0.7, -0.8, and 0.7.  So far in 2025, he has accumulated 1.9 WAR, but that’s already been factored into his 46.8 cumulative total.  At this rate, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.  But should that affect his chances at the Hall of Fame?

In the 500 homer club list above, you’ll also notice that the majority of the names are in bold.  That indicates that they have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.  You’ll also notice that, although I’ve been implying that 500 homers gets you into the Hall, there are nine players that are not in bold.  Aside from Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, who are not yet eligible for the Hall of Fame until 2028, the other seven have been suspected and accused of PEDs and are not in the Hall of Fame.  That is a conversation for another time.  But assuming Giancarlo has been clean his whole career, which we have no allegations or indications that he is anything other than clean, he should get in.

On another note, people tend to overlook just how many home runs 500 is.  Just doing the math on it shows how necessary it is to have consistent production.  To get to 500 home runs, you need:

10 seasons of 50 home runs

15 seasons of 34 home runs

20 seasons of 25 home runs

Think about a player starting at age 20 and hitting 25 home runs every year until they’re 40.  That’s incredible and consistent production.  This is why I took the 500 club and sorted them by home run rate, or the percentage of plate appearances where they hit a home run, and you’ll see who hit the most home runs in the shortest amount of time played in the majors.

Mark McGwire hitting 583 home runs in 16 seasons is impressive, even with the PEDs.  But what we can take away from this measurement is that Eddie Murray had the lowest HR rate per plate appearance on the list at 3.93%, so a player is going to need to have a similar rate in order to have a chance at the 500 home run club.  However, Eddie Murray has the second-most plate appearances on this list after Hank Aaron.  I think the better assumption to go off of is that a player needs to be above 4.5% to get there, as well as be consistently healthy, and consistently great.  So, where does Giancarlo Stanton fit?

I took the top 100 active home run leaders and immediately sorted the list by HR rate.  Then, I removed the hitters below 3.90%, slightly below the bottom mark from our friend above, Eddie Murray.  That left us with 58 hitters.  Here’s a look at our top 23:

There’s Big G right at the top!  We have quite a few mashers in our presence right now.  It looks like Giancarlo will get there, considering his HR rate of 6.29%.  But just for fun, how many others will get there?

I’m no statistician.  I can barely use Google Sheets and I rely on sites like FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant, etc. to get the data and help me sort it.  But I had to do what I could to project how many of these guys will hit the 500 homer mark and beyond.  So what I did was take the average plate appearances per year for each guy, and multiply it by their home run rate to project out how many home runs they would have by their age 40 season.  Yes, I know, we’re only working with averages and someone in their age 38 season is likely not going to produce the same as they did in their age 27 season, so just play along for the exercise.  So let’s take a look at what these projections would look like if each of these guys played until they were 40 with the same average production they have now:

Stay with me now, I know this is wishful thinking for most of these guys, but what really opened my eyes is the production of the top guys.  I had not considered how young Juan Soto is, nor did I consider how efficient a guy like Pete Alonso is in the HR category.  Aaron Judge absolutely dwarfs everyone with his HR rate at 7.31%, with Shohei, Giancarlo, and Kyle Schwarber being the closest 3 at 6.44%, 6.29%, and 6.28% respectively.  Once again, things such as injuries, age, and positional value can all influence production, and until I figure out how to properly factor in the weight of increasing age and injury risk, this is the best I can do. Will we see Juan Soto hit 641 homers? Probably not, but considering he’s 21st among active players in home runs already and he’s only 26, he has a pretty good shot at 500 at least.

I think Giancarlo hits 500 homers and I think he gets into the Hall of Fame.

What do you think?  Who on this list will make it to 500?  Will we see someone hit the 600 mark?