Which active players can realistically reach 3K strikeouts after Clayton Kershaw?
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How long will Clayton Kershaw be able to pitch in 2025, now that he’s recovered from surgeries on both his knee and toe? As always seems to be the case with Kershaw over the last few years, there is no real answer. The Dodgers will get the innings from him that they can, until they cannot. From 2021 through 2023, the future Hall of Famer made 22, 22, and 24 starts, and appeared in just seven games in 2024 before his season was cut short.
However, many games he plays in 2025, he has a major milestone in his sights. After making his season debut on Saturday against the Angels, Kershaw stands at 2,970 career strikeouts, which ranks 21st all-time at the moment. Only 19 pitchers have ever reached the 3,000-strikeout mark in their career, and Kershaw is in line to be the 20th. Ahead of him is Zack Greinke, who is 21 punchouts short of the vaunted 3,000 but hasn’t played since 2023.
Kershaw is close enough that he should be able to reach it even if his health doesn’t allow him to stick around long in 2025, which is great if you’re into difficult-to-reach round numbers. And for as elusive it is to reach the 3,000-hit club (33 members), it’s a significantly less exclusive one than 3,000 strikeouts.
The only reason there are even 19 pitchers with at least 3,000 strikeouts is due to a few recent entries to the list. Justin Verlander (3,451) and Max Scherzer (3,408) are the only active pitchers who have already managed the feat, with Verlander pulling it off in 2019 and Scherzer in 2021. (Verlander also became just the second-ever player to reach 3,000 strikeouts in the same game that he recorded his 300th strikeout of the season, joining Randy Johnson, who did the same in 2000.) CC Sabathia isn’t active, but he, too, picked up his 3,000th K in 2019.
Every single retired pitcher on the list is in the Hall of Fame, save Roger Clemens. The former Red Sox, Yankees, and Astros star received 65% of the vote in his final chance through the BBWAA, short of the 75% required for election, but could still enter Cooperstown through a veterans’ committee vote in the next few years. Verlander, 42, and Scherzer, 40, will surely reach the Hall of Fame the old-fashioned way after they retire.
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Which is to say that only the greatest have reached this particular threshold. Kershaw’s achievements stand for themselves with or without 3,000 strikeouts — three Cy Young awards, four other top-five finishes for the award, 10 All-Star appearances, the 2014 Most Valuable Player award and votes in five other seasons, over 2,700 career innings, his current spot as the league’s active leader in ERA (2.50) and ERA+ (156) for his career. Yes, a 2.50 career ERA over 2,700 innings. Maybe it’s a little easy to forget now, as he’s aged and been injured more regularly, but Kershaw had a 10-year stretch where he posted ERAs under 3, from age 21 through 30, where his actual ERA for that entire run was 2.29. Truly, one of the greats.
While the 37-year-old Kershaw reaching 3,000 strikeouts is seemingly assured, barring a surprise end to his career based on conversations in the spring – he doesn’t want to retire until he can go out on his own terms, rather than with a season like 2024 that ended on the IL — the next player to reach 3,000 strikeouts after him is a little tougher to pin down. It’s even tougher after that, and… then it gets real, real difficult to project.
Chris Sale is in his 15th season in the majors. At age 36, he sits at 2,486 strikeouts; still a ways off, but given he won the NL Cy Young award in 2024 while striking out a league-leading 225 batters, it’s also not difficult to see him reaching 3,000 before his career ends. The problem for Sale is health: the reason he hasn’t already logged his 3,000th strikeout is because of how the non-2024 parts of this decade have gone for him. He missed all of 2020 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, and all but nine starts in 2021 as he recovered from the procedure. He had a stress fracture in his ribs and surgery on a fractured pinky that, combined, cost him all but two starts in 2022. Then, a stress fracture in his scapula in 2023 took 70 days of his season: all told, he managed 182 strikeouts over 151 innings, which is perfectly Chris Sale, but it took three seasons to put that together.
If he can stay healthy, 3,000 shouldn’t be difficult to reach, even if the overall quality of his performance declines as he enters his late-30s. That’s a significant if, though, considering.
The next candidate for 3,000 K’s is Gerrit Cole, who is currently recovering from Tommy John surgery. The Yankees’ ace is out for all of 2025 after undergoing the procedure, but he’s expected to be back in 2026. He sits at 2,251 strikeouts, averaging 214 of them per year from 2017 through 2024, despite the pandemic-shortened 2020 and an injury-shortened 2024. From 2021 through 2023, Cole recorded 243, a league-leading 257, and 222 strikeouts. Assuming everything goes right with his surgery and recovery, then there’s little reason to expect him to pitch much differently in 2026. So he’s further away than Sale, but might have a better chance of actually getting there when you consider that he’s two years younger and has proven more durable overall.
After those two… well. Charlie Morton is next up among active leaders, but even leaving aside his horrid start to 2025, is also 41 years old and over 900 strikeouts short. Yu Darvish just crossed the 2,000-strikeout threshold last summer, but he’s already 38. If you include his seven seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball, though, Darvish has 3,257 over his career, as he recorded 1,250 strikeouts in Japan before coming over to MLB for the 2012 season. NPB, for the record, has just four pitchers who have reached 3,000 strikeouts.
You then have to go all the way to Aaron Nola at just 1,831 strikeouts for the next-highest active player. He would need absolutely perfect health from here on out, while averaging around 150 strikeouts per season from now through 2032. Not impossible! But it’s the little bit of built-in improbability in these exercises that have kept so many others, Hall of Famers included, from reaching 3,000.
Ask Jacob deGrom about that. He’s arguably the greatest pitcher of his generation in terms of pure talent, and the fastest to reach 1,700 career strikeouts, as he recently achieved in May. However, it took him until he was 37 as that is measured by games – and deGrom’s years are full of injuries that have limited him from recording even more.
Beyond Nola, it’s basically impossible to say now, which is a combination of pitchers too old to get there before it’s time to retire, and pitchers too young to project forward. Strikeouts might be higher than they’ve ever been, but innings are so much lower these days counters that rise: teams are more willing to go to their bullpens sooner and more regularly. That means there will be fewer Kershaws, which were already a rarity, but also the likes of Sale, or Cole, or Darvish, or Nola. And the rise of major elbow injuries, owing at least in part to the commitment to going all-out with every pitch for maximum velocity, means more pitchers will miss time — including entire seasons — interrupting their chance to compile the necessary strikeouts for a historic outcome.
Consider the young phenom, Pirates ace Paul Skenes: for all the talent he’s already shown at 23, he also averages under six innings per start. He’s made 33 starts and struck out 232 batters in his young career, but he’d need to keep that up for almost 14 years in total to reach 3,000 strikeouts. That’s a huge ask that leaves little wiggle room for injuries of any kind, never mind one like a torn UCL that will eat at least one season of a career, depending on the timing of the injury and procedure.
Which is all a long way of saying to appreciate what Kershaw has already done and what he appears to be on the verge of doing. This is not something that’s happened very often in MLB history as is, and it’s likely only going to become that much rarer going forward.
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