Twenty-eight men have hit 500 home runs in the major leagues. Nine have hit 600. Exactly five have hit 700, and the fifth of them finished in 2022, which means most people reading this watched it happen. The list is short enough to memorise and long enough that almost nobody can name the back half of it, which is the ideal shape for an argument.
What follows is the top 25, taken from Major League Baseball's own records. The numbers are the numbers. What they are worth is the interesting part, because a home run total is the most era-dependent statistic in the sport: it depends on the ball, the park, the mound, the schedule, and whether the man hitting was allowed to play in the major leagues at all.
Barry Bonds, 762
Bonds finished with 762 home runs across 22 seasons, from 1986 to 2007. He is the only man above 760 and the only man to hit 73 in a single season, which he did in 2001 at the age of 36.
The shape of his career is what makes the total remarkable even before you get to the arguments about it. Bonds hit 411 home runs in his first thirteen seasons, through 1998, which on its own would have put him somewhere in the thirties on this list. He hit 351 more in the nine seasons that followed. Nobody else has done anything like it; the back half of a slugger's career is normally where the total stops growing, not where it doubles.
His career average of .298 and 1,996 runs batted in are both figures that would carry a Hall of Fame case on their own.
Hank Aaron, 755
Aaron held the record for 33 years, and he did it without a single season above 47 home runs. That is the whole story of his career in one sentence: he was never the best power hitter in baseball in a given year, and he was the best power hitter in baseball across two decades.
He played 3,298 games, more than anyone else in this top five, and drove in 2,297 runs, which is still the most in major league history. He hit .305 for a career that ran from 1954 to 1976.
Aaron is the argument for durability over peak, and the reason this list rewards men who kept turning up.
Babe Ruth, 714
Ruth hit 714 home runs in 2,504 games, which is roughly 800 fewer games than Aaron needed. He needed 11.8 at-bats per home run, the best rate of anyone in the top ten, and he hit .342 while doing it.
The context that makes the number strange is that he spent the start of his career as a pitcher and the whole of it before integration, against a fraction of the available talent. He also hit more home runs in 1920 than several entire teams managed that season. Whatever you make of the era, no player has ever been further ahead of his own league.
Albert Pujols, 703
Pujols reached 700 in his final season, 2022, and finished on 703. For most of the decade before that, it had looked like he would not get there: he hit 445 home runs in his first eleven seasons and needed another eleven to add 258 more.
His last year was the good kind of strange. He turned 42 during it and hit 24 home runs, more than he had managed in any of the four seasons before. Across 3,080 games he hit .296 and drove in 2,218, second only to Aaron.
Alex Rodriguez, 696
Rodriguez is four short of the club he spent a decade being expected to join comfortably. He hit 696 in 2,784 games, a rate of one every 15.2 at-bats, and he did it while playing shortstop for the first half of his career, which almost nobody on this list can say.
He is also the clearest case of a career whose total says less than its shape. Rodriguez had 518 home runs through the 2007 season, his fourteenth, and looked a certainty to pass Aaron. He hit 178 more across the eight seasons that followed, and finished four short of a round number nobody had doubted he would reach.
Willie Mays, 660
Mays finished on 660 in 3,005 games, and the number would be higher if he had not lost most of two seasons to military service in the early 1950s. He hit .301 for his career and is the only man in the top ten who was also, by common consent, the best defensive player at his position.
He is sixth here and first on a lot of other lists, which is a useful reminder that this particular ranking is not a ranking of players.
The rest of the 600 club
Nine men have reached 600. After Mays the last three are Ken Griffey Jr. on 630, Jim Thome on 612 and Sammy Sosa on 609.
Griffey is the one most often described as the player who should be higher, and the numbers support the description better than the sentiment usually does. He hit 398 home runs in his first eleven seasons, before his 30th birthday. He hit 232 in his second eleven. The first half of that career was on a pace that would have finished above Aaron.
Thome is the quieter case: 612 home runs, eighth on this list, and for most of his career nobody's idea of an all-time great. He is the best argument here that the list is not a ranking of reputations.
Ten to twenty: the names people forget
This is where the list gets genuinely hard, and it is the part worth memorising if you want to win an argument:
- Frank Robinson, 586
- Mark McGwire, 583
- Harmon Killebrew, 573
- Rafael Palmeiro, 569
- Reggie Jackson, 563
- Manny Ramirez, 555
- Mike Schmidt, 548
- David Ortiz, 541
- Mickey Mantle, 536
- Jimmie Foxx, 534
Frank Robinson at ten is the single most under-remembered player in baseball. He won the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1961 and the American League award in 1966, the only man to have taken both, and he sits above every name below him here while being named less often than most of them.
The other thing this stretch of the list does is destroy the assumption that the order tracks fame. Mike Schmidt at sixteen is, by most measures, a better player than several men above him. Mickey Mantle at eighteen is more famous than anyone in the range. Neither fact moves the list, because the list is counting one thing and counting it honestly.
The 500 club, and how exclusive it still is
Twenty-eight men have 500 home runs. The bottom of the top 25 runs through Frank Thomas, Ted Williams and Willie McCovey, all on 521, then Eddie Mathews and Ernie Banks on 512, and Mel Ott on 511.
Ted Williams on 521 is the other great what-if. He lost three full seasons to the Second World War and most of two more to Korea, and both absences fell in the middle of his prime rather than at the edges of his career. Nobody can tell you what he would have finished on, which is the only honest thing to say about it.
Willie McCovey, level with him on 521, is the opposite kind of entry: a player who was never the story of his own era and simply kept hitting for twenty-two seasons. Between them they cover both routes onto this list.
Rate, not just totals
A career total rewards longevity, and the men at the top of this list all played a very long time. If you ask instead how often each man homered, the order changes:
- Babe Ruth, one home run every 11.8 at-bats
- Barry Bonds, one every 12.9
- Alex Rodriguez, one every 15.2
- Albert Pujols, one every 16.2
- Hank Aaron, one every 16.4
- Willie Mays, one every 16.6
Aaron and Mays fall; Ruth pulls clear. This is not a better list, but it is a different question, and knowing which question you are answering is most of what separates a good baseball argument from a bad one.
What the Negro Leagues records add
In 2020 Major League Baseball recognised the Negro Leagues as major leagues and began publishing their statistics through the same records as everything else. That changed several leaderboards, and it changes how this one should be read.
Josh Gibson appears in the records with 176 home runs in 666 games. That is a rate of one every 13.1 at-bats, which sits between Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds and ahead of everyone else on this page. He also has a career batting average of .372, which is the highest in major league history.
The counting total is small because the seasons were short. Negro League teams played schedules of roughly 60 league games where the American and National Leagues played 154. Putting Gibson's 176 on a list next to Aaron's 755 and drawing a conclusion is not a hard question, it is a misleading one. The rate is the comparison that survives, and by that measure he belongs in the conversation at the very top.
The single-season list
Career totals are accumulated. Single seasons are not, and the top of that list is concentrated in a very short window:
- Barry Bonds, 73 in 2001
- Mark McGwire, 70 in 1998
- Sammy Sosa, 66 in 1998
- Mark McGwire, 65 in 1999
- Sammy Sosa, 64 in 2001
- Sammy Sosa, 63 in 1999
Six of the highest totals in history came in four seasons. Aaron Judge's 62 in 2022 set the American League record, passing Roger Maris and his 61 from 1961, and it is the only entry near the top from outside that window.
What people do with that fact is an argument this article is not going to settle. The record book records the numbers; how you weigh them is yours.
Who among active players gets close
Nobody, on current evidence. The leading active home run hitters are Giancarlo Stanton on 456, Mike Trout on 425, Manny Machado on 397 and Bryce Harper on 391.
Reaching 600 from there requires a decade of health at an age when sluggers historically stop having one. Reaching 700 requires something closer to what Bonds did after 33, and that has happened once.
The likelier outcome is that 500 keeps admitting a member every few years and the top of the list stays exactly where it is for a long time.
What the list has in common
Read it from the top and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with power. Every man in the top ten played at least seventeen seasons. Eight of them played more than twenty. The home run record is not a measure of how hard somebody hit a baseball, it is a measure of how many times they were allowed to try.
That is why the era arguments matter and why the Negro Leagues recognition matters. The list does not rank hitters. It ranks careers, and careers are made of opportunity as much as ability.
The men on this list turn up constantly in our daily puzzles, and the ones at the back of it are where a round is usually won or lost. Try naming the whole board in MLB Top 10 Quiz, or work out a career one club at a time in MLB Career Path.