Most Home Runs by a Shortstop

Cal Ripken Jr. hit the most home runs while playing shortstop, with 353. That figure counts only the home runs he hit while manning the position, and it edges Alex Rodriguez, who hit 345 as a shortstop before moving to third base. Figures are as of the 2025 season.

The record is trickier than it looks because of one word: “while.” This is not a list of career home runs by players who happened to be shortstops. It counts home runs hit in games the player actually played short, which changes the leaderboard entirely and explains why Rodriguez, with 696 career homers, does not top it. Here is the full list and how the distinction works.

The most home runs hit while playing shortstop

The table ranks players by home runs hit while playing shortstop, alongside their career totals so you can see the gap the position rule creates. Figures are as of the 2025 season.

Player	HR as shortstop	Career HR	Note
Cal Ripken Jr.	353	431	Moved to third base in 1997
Alex Rodriguez	345	696	Moved to third base in 2004
Ernie Banks	298	512	Later shifted to first base
Francisco Lindor	287	—	Active
Miguel Tejada	285	307	Longtime shortstop
Derek Jeter	260	260	Nearly all as a shortstop

The spread between a player’s shortstop total and career total tells the story. Ripken and Rodriguez both moved off the position and kept hitting home runs elsewhere; only the ones they hit at short count here.

Why “while playing shortstop” matters

Shortstop is the most demanding infield position, so power hitters often start there young and slide to an easier spot as they age. That migration is exactly why the career-total and position-total lists look so different.

Rodriguez is the clearest case. He hit 345 home runs as a shortstop with Seattle and Texas, a huge total, then joined the Yankees in 2004 and moved to third base so Derek Jeter could stay at short. Most of his eventual 696 home runs came after the switch, at third, and none of those count toward the shortstop record. Ernie Banks did the same in reverse era: he hit 298 at short before his knees pushed him to first base, where he added the rest of his 512.

Cal Ripken Jr.’s case for the record

Ripken leads because he combined power with staying at the position deep into his career. He played shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles from the early 1980s into 1997, redefining what a big-bodied shortstop could be, and hit 353 home runs before finally sliding to third base near the end.

His durability is the multiplier. Ripken’s consecutive-games streak meant he was in the lineup at short almost every day for well over a decade, so his home runs piled up at the position rather than being split across a move. Power plus presence at short, sustained for 15 years, is what put him first.

The active chase and the single-season mark

The list is not frozen. Francisco Lindor has hit 287 home runs as a shortstop and is still adding to it, the closest any active player sits to Ripken. If he stays at the position rather than shifting late in his career, the record is genuinely in play. Fernando Tatis Jr. was on a similar path before moving to the outfield, which effectively capped his shortstop total.

One more distinction is worth keeping straight. The career record here belongs to Ripken, but the single-season home run record for a shortstop is Rodriguez’s: 57 in 2002 with Texas, breaking Banks’s old mark of 47. Career versus single-season are two different records, and the position’s two greatest power hitters split them.

For more of baseball’s positional and power records, see our list of the most grand slams in MLB history, and if you want to test how well you know hitters by their stat profiles, our daily Era Ball game challenges you to place players across eras. Ripken’s 353 is the number to know: the most home runs anyone has hit from the game’s hardest defensive position.