Baseball’s All Time Hits Leaders

Ted Williams was once quoted as saying: “I think without question the hardest single thing to do in sport is to hit a baseball”. He’s not alone in this belief, and it’s hard to argue with the fact even the very best hitters baseball has ever seen still fail to get a hit more than 60% of the time.  It’s simply not an easy thing to do, and to do it successfully with any kind of regularity takes a special combination of speed, smarts, vision, power, and patience that only comes along once in a great while.

Power hitters and the home run numbers they put up have gotten most of the limelight since Babe Ruth came on the scene and started blasting moonshots out of Yankee Stadium with impressive frequency, but real students of the game know that consistent and timely hits are the way ballgames are won, and the players who manage to produce them season after season are really where the action is.

That being said, here’s a list of the top 100 all time hits leaders in Major League Baseball. This list is sortable by statistic, so you can see how Ty Cobb‘s OBP stacks up against Derek Jeter‘s, as well as who among the top 100 had the highest career batting average, who also hit for power, and who had the patience to take a walk if they didn’t get the pitch they were looking for.  Even among baseball’s greatest players, these 100 are the best of the best, enjoy.

All Time Hits Leaders