With his three-run home run in the ninth inning of Wednesday evening's 10-0 win over the Milwaukee Brewers, Bryce Harper is now 19 home runs away from 300 in his career.
Harper has homered 14 times for the Philadelphia Phillies in 2022. The two-time National League MVP will need to get to 33 home runs this season to get to 300, which seems very doable considering he's topped 33 home runs in each of the last three full seasons.
Set to turn 30 in October, Harper has a chance to enter his thirties with 300 home runs already in the bank. That would set him up well to surpass 500 home runs before his career -- likely destined for Cooperstown -- concludes.
We don't know if Harper intends to play beyond his current contract, but he still has nine years remaining on the 13-year/$330 million deal that he signed to join the Phillies after spending parts of seven seasons with the Washington Nationals. Time isn't yet an issue.
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Let's say that Harper homers 33 times in 2022, leaving him with exactly 300 home runs entering his age-30 season. If he homers 30 times in each of the next four seasons -- a relatively conservative estimate -- that would set him up to surpass 400 career home runs at some point during the 2026 season. Perhaps Harper would hit his 400th career home run at Citizens Bank Park shortly before the stadium hosts the MLB All-Star Game that summer.
The last player to hit his 400th career home run in a Phillies uniform was Jim Thome, who did so on June 14, 2004. Thome had hit the first 337 home runs of his career with the franchise now known as the Cleveland Guardians, though, so while he was an instant fan-favorite in Philadelphia, it wasn't the type of moment that Harper hitting his 400th home run as a Phillie would be. Harper hit 184 home runs as a National, so by the time he gets to 400 home runs, he'll have hit more home runs as a member of the Phillies.
If Harper hits an average of 25 home runs per season over the final nine years of his current contract -- a purposely conservative estimate that tries to factor in injuries and inevitable decline -- that would give him an additional 225 home runs on top of the 300 home runs that we've estimated him to have at the conclusion of 2022. That would put him well over 500 career home runs, with the milestone home run in this scenario likely to come either in the 2030 or 2031 seasons.
Of course, the only player to ever hit his 500th home run as a Phillie was Mike Schmidt, who reached the mark on April 18, 1987. By the time we're estimating Harper would reach 500, more than 40 years would have gone by.
Harper almost certainly won't finish his career with the most home runs in a Phillies uniform given that Schmidt hit all 548 of his as a member of the franchise. But if he remains healthy, there's an outside shot that Harper could finish his career with more home runs than Schmidt.
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