500 home runs? 600? How high can Ohtani go?

Three hundred home runs is just the start for Shohei Ohtani. So what's the finish?

Even if you're not thinking about the fact that he also pitches, Ohtani reaching the 300-homer milestone is impressive enough on its own. He just turned 32 years old, he's only in his ninth MLB season, and he's played just over 1,100 games. Ohtani is one of the few hitters to reach 300 home runs in less than a decade, and one of the fastest hitters to do it by games played.

Now the question is: How far can he take it? How many home runs will Ohtani hit in his Major League career?

Can he get to 500 home runs? Or … dare we say it … 600?

Let's run some numbers, with the help of MLB data guru Tom Tango.

To figure out Ohtani's chances of getting to the big career home run milestones, we took 20 of the best player comparisons, based on his age and his MVP-level home run hitting. … Basically, we looked at the guys who were hitting the very most home runs leading up to age 32, since Ohtani has mashed about 175 of them over the last four years. (We didn't include Ohtani's two top contemporaries, Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber, in that group, since they're still slugging.)

Then we looked at what those 20 players did for the rest of their careers, compared to what they did in the previous time window of their recent seasons, to get a baseline projection for Ohtani.

That projection? 518 career home runs. That's the average for Shohei. That's Hall of Fame hitter stuff.

There's also another way we can look at it: using those players from the past to tell the different possible stories for Ohtani.

Those 20 comparable home run hitters fall into different tiers, depending on how many home runs they hit as they aged past 32. We can use each of those groups to see what type of home run pace Ohtani would have to sustain to join the all-time power-hitting greats.

Long story short: Ohtani has a real chance to hit some big, round numbers. He should breeze into the 400-home run club. The 500 home run club is a reasonable expectation to have for him at this point. And even the 600 home run club is within reach.

Here's a look at the three possible career paths for Ohtani -- a "low-end" trajectory, a "typical" trajectory and a "high-end" trajectory.

The low end: 400 home runs (the Jeff Bagwell trajectory)

If you assume Ohtani hits his projections for the rest of this season (which would mean he approaches another 40-homer season, ho hum), he's going to be sitting at right around 320 home runs at the end of 2026.

The next milestone up would be 400 homers, a mere 80 away. Peak Ohtani gets there in a couple of seasons, give or take.

Now, there are a few prodigious power hitters who fell off a cliff after age 32 -- mainly derailed by injury, like Mo Vaughn, Albert Belle and Ryan Howard. But if Ohtani can avoid that worst-case scenario, even if he declines faster than many of the other great home run hitters, he should still reach the 400-450 home run range.

That's the Jeff Bagwell trajectory. Bagwell is in the "lower" tier of elite home run hitter aging curves, but the Hall of Famer still put up some big seasons for the Astros in his mid-30s and finished his career with 449 long balls.

Even if Ohtani wasn't a two-way player, a hitting résumé like Bagwell's would be worthy of Hall of Fame consideration alone. But it's fair to hope for more from Ohtani, too.

The standard: 500 home runs (the Willie McCovey trajectory)

We want to see Ohtani in the 500 home run club. We think he can get there. So do his Dodgers teammates -- apparently, they're always talking about it.

He'll likely need somewhere in the ballpark of 180 homers after 2026 to get there. But if Ohtani ages like a lot of the great home run hitters who came before him, he will.

Again, as we stand today, the average back-of-the-napkin career forecast for Ohtani is close to 520 homers.

That's what would happen if Ohtani has the longevity of a Hall of Fame hitter like Willie McCovey, who was able to keep on hitting homers for about another decade after he got to Ohtani's age, and finished his career with 521 of them.

Sluggers like Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez also fall into that "typical" rest-of-career home run trajectory for a superstar power hitter. If Ohtani finished his career like any of them, he would be able to reach the 500-homer milestone.

All in all, 13 of the 20 hitters we're using for our Ohtani projections -- that's 65% -- were able to keep up the home run rate Ohtani would need to get to 500. That's a good sign for Shohei.

The ceiling: 600 home runs (the Jim Thome trajectory)

Now this is the really fun part of our thought experiment. What if Ohtani hits more than 500 home runs? What if he hits a lot more?

Could he get all the way to 600? That's a number only nine hitters in MLB history have ever reached.

The chance is not zero. The precedent is there.

We do have a small group of home run kings who show that, if Ohtani follows their top-tier career trajectory, he could end up hitting 600.

Five of the 20 hitters in Ohtani's comparison group sustained such a pace. Those five are Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jim Thome and David Ortiz. And a sixth, Albert Pujols, was very close.

Thome is maybe the ideal blueprint for Ohtani here, since he both hit a lot of late-career homers and actually reached the 600-homer plateau. The Thome trajectory means Ohtani doesn't have to be "literally Barry Bonds" to get to 600. And he also has arguably a higher home run ceiling than Ortiz, who was really awesome late in his career, even up to age 40, but finished with 541 homers because he didn't hit as many early on.

Thome just kept plowing ahead as a great home run hitter into his mid-30s, then stuck around as a solid home run hitter just long enough to get to the 600-homer milestone. We could see Ohtani doing something like that himself.

The 600 home run club would truly be mind-boggling, even by Ohtani standards. Because, again, he is also a pitcher. If that happens, we might have to build him his own wing in the Hall of Fame.