Yordan Álvarez Hits His 40th Home Run — the Fifth Cuban-Born Player to Reach 40

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.

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

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 arrives level with 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

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 149 of Houston’s 153 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 Triple Crown position, as of 18 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.

He leads one leg outright and is second in the other two, one home run and three runs batted in behind, with nine 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 nine games. What is live is the tie. One more home run moves Álvarez past Tony Pérez and into outright fourth place among Cuban-born players, a position no one has occupied since Canseco vacated it.

Houston is 77-76 and one game ahead of Texas in the American League West, which is the other reason these nine games matter. Álvarez’s 40th 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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