Among the many career accomplishments of Los Angeles Dodgers legend and future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, who announced his intent to retire at the end of the current season on Thursday, is a pitching benchmark that he may prove even more elusive in the future. That benchmark is 3,000 strikeouts. 

In early July of this season, Kershaw became the 20th pitcher in Major League Baseball history to join that exclusive guild and just the fourth left-hander. As you can surmise, it’s already a vanishingly rare feat, but will it now just vanish altogether? That’s a plausible question to ask, and it has to do with how starting pitchers are used in the contemporary era. 

To illustrate the point, here are the active career strikeout leaders in MLB: 

Justin Verlander

3,543

42

Max Scherzer

3,482

40

Clayton Kershaw

3,039

37

Chris Sale

2,564

36

Gerrit Cole

2,251

35

Charlie Morton

2,193

41

Yu Darvish

2,067

39

Kevin Gausman

1,942

34

Sonny Gray

1,911

35

Aaron Nola

1,863

32

As you can see, just four active pitchers have topped 2,000 strikeouts without reaching 3,000. Two of those – Morton and Darvish – aren’t genuine threats to reach 3,000. But what of the other two, Sale and Cole? 

To probe this matter, we’ll be calling upon Bill James’ “favorite toy” formula. The favorite toy is a rather quick and somewhat dirty way to project a player’s career total in whatever counting measure you can dream up based on that player’s age and recent performance trends. It’s a blunt instrument and it skews a bit conservative sometimes, but it does give you a rough idea of how likely a player is to reach a certain statistical threshold.  

In this instance, here’s what we get out of the favorite toy when it comes to Sale’s and Cole’s chances of becoming the next moundsman to register 3,000 strikeouts (we’re using each pitcher’s projected 2025 strikeout total to satisfy that part of the formula): 

The favorite toy projects Sale to finish his career with 2,938 strikeouts, and it gives him a 36% chance of reaching 3,000. With Sale, the question is never going to be about his capacity to miss bats even well into his thirties. Rather, it’s going to be about health and durability. Only once since 2017 has he managed a qualifying number of innings in a season. In Cole’s case, his outputs are compromised by the fact that he’s missed the entire season while recovering from Tommy John surgery and thus has a “zero” as his 2025 input. If we instead use his 2022-24 strikeout numbers in the formula we get a projected career total of 2,716 strikeouts and a 12% chance of reaching 3,000. I’d probably take the over on both of those figures given that Cole is signed through 2028 with the Yankees and seems like the kind of pitcher who’ll be able to pitch beyond that point. Much, of course, will depend upon how Cole rebounds from Tommy John in 2026. 

Looking further down the list, we have Gausman, Gray, and Nola, none of whom have reached 2,000 yet. Let’s apply the favorite toy to their respective 3,000-strikeouts cases: 

The system tabs Gausman for 2,468 career strikeouts and gives him no chance of reaching 3,000. Gray is projected for 2,602 career strikeouts and given a 14% chance of getting to 3,000. Nola, who’s a relatively youthful 32, isn’t a good fit for the system. That’s because his strikeouts have cratered this year, mostly because of injury but also because of struggles. Because of those factors, the toy forecasts that he’ll pitch just two-and-a-half more seasons. Given that Nola is signed through 2030 with the Phillies, he’s all but certain to pitch for significantly longer than that. Using that as an end date, Nola from 2026 through 2030 — building off his projected strikeout total for 2025 — would need to average 215 strikeouts per season to reach 3,000 by the end of his current contract, when he’ll be coming off his age-37 campaign. Nola during his peak was able to put up those kinds of K numbers for half a decade or so, but he’s probably beyond peak now. As is the case with almost all these pitchers, the missing chunk of the abbreviated 2020 season is making things more difficult. Nola has more of a shot than favorite toy gives him, but it’s probably no more than 10% or so. 

Looking further afield, to find the first pitcher who’s not yet 30 years of age on the active strikeout leaderboard, we have to go all the way down to 29-year-old Dylan Cease at No. 34. He’s at 1,217 career strikeouts, and as such is not even halfway to 3,000. The toy gives him a 5% chance at 3,000. And the best pitcher in baseball, Tarik Skubal? He’s at 881 career strikeouts as a 28-year-old. He also gets a 5% chance from the system. You get the idea

So why is the 3,000 striker-outer potentially becoming imperiled? MLB in recent years has been more of a strikeout circuit than ever, but overwhelming this trend is the decline of starting pitcher usage and the related matter of pitcher health in the era of maxed-out velocity and spin. This season, starting pitchers are averaging 5.2 innings per start. A decade ago, this figure was 5.8. Twenty years ago, the average starting pitcher went six innings per start. The farther you go back, the farther that figure goes up in a general sense. Yes, the use of openers skews the current numbers a bit but not enough to undermine the prevailing trend. Starting pitchers these days are working fewer innings per start, getting hurt more often, and making fewer starts overall. The six-man rotation is becoming a thing, you know. 

Sure, MLB may at some point undertake structural changes to revive the workhorse starting pitchers — stricter limits on the number of rostered pitchers for instance, or maybe limits on how many relievers can be used in a game — but such changes would incentivize starters to ease back on their effort level. That, in turn, would come at a cost of strikeouts. All of that is speculative. What isn’t is the dearth of serious 3,000-strikeout candidates after we move past that leaderboard up top. 

And so a nation turns its lonely eyes to … Paul Skenes? The Pirates‘ ace among aces is a throwback sort in terms of workloads and, thus far, stamina and health (all available fingers should be crossed at this juncture). He’s probably going to win the Cy Young as a 23-year-old.  Over the first 54 starts of his career, he’s averaged almost six innings per turn while striking out more than 30% of opposing batters (an elite figure for a starter). 

Casting those lonely eyes ahead just a bit, let’s say Skenes ends his 2026 season with 600 or more career strikeouts. He’s presently at 379, so that’s entirely doable given his tallies to date. If he pulls that off, then he’ll join Dwight Gooden as the only starting pitchers since 1900 to strike out 600 or more batters by age 24 across his first three seasons. No, Gooden did not reach 3,000 for a variety of reasons, one of which was very likely irresponsibly high workloads foisted upon him at the outset of his career. Skenes has no such worries on that front. Skenes has been a throwback sort in more ways than one, and one of those ways may be his propensity to amass strikeouts in defiance of so many baseball headwinds. 

Until further notice, Sale and Cole are our best chances to join Kershaw in the 3,000 strikeout fraternity. In the years to come, though, Skenes may barge into the discussion, and that may make him the last, best hope for 3,000. Â