Giancarlo Stanton sits 47 home runs away from 500 for his career, that nice round number that counts for quite a bit in Hall of Fame discussion. It does feel like that chase will come right down to the wire, with Stanton’s contract running through the 2027 season but with some kind of labor stoppage likely after the CBA expires in November, Big G might miss #500 because he’ll just run out of games. He’ll be 38 trying to find a roster spot in 2028 — the Yankees do have a club option for that year — and teams already have to pencil in some IL time for him every year.
Some other Yankees are also looking up at milestone achievements though, and we can expect some big ones in 2026. Barring injury, Aaron Judge should hit hit 400th home run and score his 1000th run in MLB, needing 32 and 127 respectively. That 400th dinger comes with a little something extra; if Judge can hit 32 home runs in less than 621 at-bats, he’ll eclipse that mark — pun intended, as McGwire did it in 4726 ABs — faster than any player in Major League history.
It’s rather remarkable that we should expect all three accomplishments, the 400th homer, the AB constraint, and the 1000 runs scored, to come in one season because that’s just how good Aaron Judge has been in this peak of his career. 32 home runs would be seen as a significant step back from his usual production, and Aaron’s passed 127 runs scored in 2025, 2022 and 2017, while falling five short in 2024. FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projects Judge to blast past 400 home runs, but not quite reach 1000 runs scored, but projection systems often struggle when a player is so far above the typical MLB baseline.
Max Fried, meanwhile, needs just eight wins to hit 100 for his career, while his fellow lefty Carlos Rodón needs seven. Both should be reachable in 2026, although questions about when exactly Rodón will return from elbow surgery linger. Depth Charts pegs him for 28 starts, which would mean missing about the first month of the season, and that feels appropriate to the Yankees’ level of caution. If he’s back before that and as effective as he was last year, both southpaws should get over the century mark.
Lastly, there’s a very, very outside chance Gerrit Cole crosses a major strikeout threshold, as he sits 249 punchouts short of 2500. I think this is likely to be a scenario like Stanton’s mentioned above, where we will probably have to wait and see how many games get played in 2027 before we can accurately project when or if Cole will ever get to that number. He hasn’t struck out that many men since 2022, and coming off of Tommy John surgery at 35, I expect the Yankees to be even more careful with the righty than they’ll be with Rodón. Still, a 1 percent chance of something happening is worth the fantasy.
What’s really striking when you do posts like this is how many players the Yankees have that are building very real Hall of Fame cases for themselves. Fried and Rodón aren’t there yet of course, but Stanton and Judge and Cole will all get serious consideration and likely enshrinement if their careers wrap up with some grace and without a crater. That the Yankees could assemble so much talent over multiple seasons and have no rings to show for it though, is perhaps more of an indictment of the organization than anything else.