Yordan Álvarez hit the 40th home run of his season on 17 September 2026, a fifth-inning fly ball to right field off Seth Lugo in Houston’s 6-2 win over Kansas City at Daikin Park. It left the bat at 107.2 mph and travelled 385 feet. It was a career high, and it made him only the fifth player born in Cuba to reach 40 home runs in a major league season.
Update, 23 September 2026: Álvarez hit his 41st on 22 September, a two-run drive to right field off Carlos Vargas in the eighth inning of Houston’s 7-0 win at Seattle. That moves him past Tony Pérez and into outright fourth place among Cuban-born players for home runs in a single season. The tables and the Triple Crown standings below are current to the morning of 23 September.
Final, 5 October 2026: Álvarez finished the regular season with 42 home runs. The 42nd came on 26 September, a three-run line drive to right field off Jack Perkins in the fifth inning of Houston’s 13–2 win over the Athletics. He did not win the Triple Crown — Pete Alonso of the Orioles led the American League in home runs (43) and runs batted in (113, to Álvarez’s 106) — but he won the batting title at .316 and led the league, and the majors, in on-base percentage and slugging as well. No Cuban-born player had done that; we set out the record here. Houston won the AL West at 81–81 and lost the Wild Card Series to the White Sox in two games. The 40-homer table and his career line below now carry the final figures; the Triple Crown section is left as it stood on 23 September.
That second sentence is the part the game accounts do not carry, and it is the part worth checking properly. We checked it the only way it can be checked: every 40-homer season in major league history — 378 of them, by 167 different players — screened one by one against the birth country recorded in the MLB Stats API. Five of those players were born in Cuba.
The Cuban-born 40-homer club
| Player | Birthplace | Best season | HR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jorge Soler | Havana | 2019 (Royals) | 48 |
| Rafael Palmeiro | Havana | 1999 (Rangers) | 47 |
| José Canseco | Havana | 1998 (Blue Jays) | 46 |
| Yordan Álvarez | Las Tunas | 2026 (Astros) | 42 |
| Tony Pérez | Camagüey | 1970 (Reds) | 40 |
Palmeiro reached 47 twice, in 1999 and 2001, and had two more seasons of 43. Canseco had 44 in 1991 and 42 in 1988 alongside his 46. The table lists each man’s best.
Álvarez has moved past Tony Pérez, whose 40 for the 1970 Cincinnati Reds was the Cuban-born single-season high for 18 years, until Canseco hit 42 in 1988. He is the first Cuban-born player to reach 40 since Jorge Soler hit 48 in 2019, and the first to do it in an Astros uniform.
Where 40 sits in his own career
| Season | G | HR | AVG | RBI | OPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 87 | 27 | .313 | 78 | 1.067 |
| 2020 | 2 | 1 | .250 | 4 | .958 |
| 2021 | 144 | 33 | .277 | 104 | .877 |
| 2022 | 135 | 37 | .306 | 97 | 1.019 |
| 2023 | 114 | 31 | .293 | 97 | .990 |
| 2024 | 147 | 35 | .308 | 86 | .959 |
| 2025 | 48 | 6 | .273 | 27 | .797 |
| 2026 | 158 | 42 | .316 | 106 | 1.033 |
His previous high was 37, in 2022. The line that makes 2026 remarkable is the one above it: 48 games in 2025. A player who appeared in fewer than a third of his club’s games last season has played in 153 of Houston’s 157 this one, and has hit more home runs than in any full year of his career.
Numbers 38, 39 and 40 came inside twelve days — 6, 15 and 17 September — after an eight-day gap between his 37th on 29 August and his 38th. The 41st followed on 22 September, off Carlos Vargas at T-Mobile Park.
The Triple Crown position, as of 23 September
Spanish-language coverage has had Álvarez “at the front of the Triple Crown” in the American League. The leaderboards do not quite say that. They say something almost as good, and it is worth printing exactly.
| Category | Leader | Álvarez |
|---|---|---|
| Batting average | Yordan Álvarez, .314 | 1st |
| Home runs | Yordan Álvarez and Junior Caminero (Rays), 41 | Tied 1st, 41 |
| Runs batted in | Pete Alonso (Orioles), 108 | 2nd, 102 |
He leads the batting average outright, has drawn level at the top of the home run list and is second in runs batted in, six behind, with five games to play. That is a live Triple Crown chase. It is not a Triple Crown, and we are not going to print it as one until it is.
What is still in front of him
Soler’s 48, Palmeiro’s 47 and Canseco’s 46 are out of reach in five games. The tie with Tony Pérez is broken: at 41, Álvarez holds outright fourth place among Cuban-born players, a position no one has occupied since Canseco vacated it.
Houston is 78-79 and level with Texas at the top of the American League West, which is the other reason these five games matter. Álvarez’s 41st came in a game the Astros needed.
For the wider picture of a record Cuban year in the majors, see Cubans in MLB 2026 and our database of Cuban major leaguers.
What we left out
We have not called this a Triple Crown lead, because it is not one. We have not said why Álvarez played only 48 games in 2025; the games-played figure is in the record and the reason is not something we have verified, so we have printed the first and left the second alone. The exit velocity and distance above are from the game’s own play-by-play record, not from a secondary report.
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