A Thousand Hits from Berlin

Berlin to Arizona

For his seventh birthday, Max Kepler's grandfather sent him a pair of Yankees pinstripe pants. Kepler was a boy in Berlin who had started playing baseball at the John F. Kennedy School, and those pants became a fixture. He wore them past the point of fit, his mother cutting open the bottoms so he could keep them on. He'd turned down a Steffi Graf Tennis Foundation scholarship that same year to play baseball.

He also played youth soccer for Hertha BSC and competed for Buchbinder Legionäre Regensburg in Germany's top baseball league. Bored and under-challenged on Berlin club teams as a teenager, he acted out until coaches told his mother they could no longer help him. A camp led him to a baseball academy in Regensburg, where he lived in boarding-school housing and trained daily.

On July 28, 2026, Kepler collected his 1,000th career hit. He is 33, a left-handed-hitting outfielder with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The Decade

Ten of Kepler's twelve major-league seasons belonged to the Minnesota Twins, who spotted him as a teenager and signed him as a 16-year-old international free agent in 2009 for a bonus of roughly $800,000. After signing, he moved with his mother to Fort Myers, Florida, finished high school quickly, and debuted in the Gulf Coast League while his father and sister initially remained in Berlin. He reached the majors in September 2015 and spent the next decade in a Twins uniform, where his defense earned the Jim Kaat Defensive Player of the Year award in 2018.

Philadelphia took him for 2025. Arizona signed him for 2026.

Twelve seasons, 1,232 games, 4,285 at-bats. Kepler has 181 home runs and 231 doubles among those thousand hits, with 575 RBI and a .235 average.

He is still in the outfield for the Diamondbacks.

Reporting: Star Tribune, ESPN, MiLB.com, Wikipedia. Career and biographical data: MLB StatsAPI, via the Fever engine.