With only 16 home runs this season, the 2008 season hasn't been the most productive year for Gary Sheffield. In fact, his 2008 total is on pace to be his lowest since 1993 (well, in a season he stayed healthy anyway) when he hit 20 for the Padres and Marlins. It also leaves Gary four homers shy of 500 in his career, so odds are he's going to have to wait until 2009 to get there.

Still, he did make Major League history on Monday night. It wasn't a personal milestone, but it has to feel pretty cool to know that you just hit the 250,000th home run in MLB history.

When Sheffield went deep off Oakland starter Gio Gonzalez in the second inning of Monday's 14-8 Tigers victory, he hit the 250,000th home run in big league history. The statistic comes courtesy of Sean Forman at Baseball-Reference.com, which has been conducting a countdown toward the milestone event on his site with research from David Vincent with the Society for American Baseball Research.

No doubt the steroids boom of the 90's and this decade helped the number along. MLB's 100,000th homer came in 1970, and it took 29 years for the total to hit 200,000 back in 1999. Since then the pace has doubled as 50,000 homers have been hit in the nine seasons since.