Adrian Beltre has 2,998 hits in his career. As soon as tomorrow’s game with the Baltimore Orioles, the Texas Rangers third baseman could join the 3,000-hit club, becoming the 31st member.

Not really a big surprise, when we look back at how long (20 seasons) and productive Beltre’s career has been. Now 38, he received MVP votes just last season, when he hit 32 home runs and drove in 104. He also won a Gold Glove, his fifth, for his defense at third base.

What is a surprise … is why Beltre, signed by the Dodgers as a teen in the Dominican and a Dodgers regular from 1998 through his sensational 2004 season, should be reaching 3,000 with the Rangers.

No Dodger has 3,000 hits. Beltre would have been the first. If he were still playing for the club that he grew up with, that is.

So, why wasn’t this guy a Dodger for life?

To answer this, we have to go back to the 2004-05 offseason.

Let’s review just how huge Beltre was in 2004, his age 25 season: 48 home runs, 200 hits, 104 runs, 121 RBI, 32 doubles, a .334, batting average a .388 on-base percentage.

He was second in MVP voting to Barry Bonds, who was so scary back then that he walked 232 times and had an OBP of .609. It was his fourth consecutive MVP award. No arguments there.

So, big season for Beltre, but it wasn’t completely out of the blue. In previous seasons he had scored as many as 84 runs, hit 20-plus homers three times and driven in as many as 85.

The season ends, and his contract is up. He is a free agent.

Now we bring into the picture Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, who had purchased the Dodgers before the 2004 season, and general manager Paul DePodesta (a disciple of Billy “Moneyball” Beane), who had just finished his first season as GM.

Beltre was paid $5 million in 2004, and he clearly was going to get a big raise. The question was: From whom?

It turned out, it was the Seattle Mariners, who signed him to a five-year, $64 million deal.

How did Beltre get away from Los Angeles? How did the Dodgers lose the main man in 2004’s 93-69, first-in-the-NL-West team?

–One explanation proffered has been that McCourt was keen to see the Dodgers, through DePodesta, tamp down the amount of money spent on players. Like Billy Beane did (and does) in Oakland.

(Now, of course, the Athletics and Dodgers are apples and watermelons, when it comes to resources. The Dodgers dominate the second-biggest market in baseball. They are a money machine, as opposed to the A’s. The Dodgers should always be able to pay something close to top dollar, but this was, allegedly, the height of the period when McCourt thought payroll could be contained.)

So, the Dodgers reportedly offered Beltre (through his agent, the Machiavellian Scott Boros) $30 million for three years. Boros laughed off the lowball offer and took the $64 million deal with the Mariners.

—-A second explanation was that DePodesta, the numbers guy, was simply not convinced that the 2004 Beltre was really him. And looking back to the three years before, Beltre’s OBP numbers were modest-to-awful — .290 and .303 and .310. (OBP matters, in advanced analysis.)

After Beltre left, DePodesta signed free agents J.D. Drew (five years, $55 million), Jeff Kent (three for $21 million and pitcher Derek Lowe (four for $36 million). To be fair, most Dodgers fans and journalists figured the 2005 club was better off with those three (or any two of them) instead of Beltre.

–A third explanation, and it might travel in conjunction with the previous two, was the Dodgers’ concern about the possibility that Beltre had used performance-enhancing drugs in his “contract” year.

We must concede that 2004 was part of baseball’s Steroids Era. Before 2004, baseball had almost no levels of punishment for players who failed tests, and tests didn’t seem to catch anyone, anyway.

Dodgers officials were talking about it, wondering what their players were doing, and perhaps not really clear how serious it was.

In December of 2007, the Mitchell Report into PED abuse in baseball was published, and it suggested strongly that the Dodgers clubhouse had a major problem with PED abuse and that club officials had been suspicious about it in the 2003, 2004 time frame. Several prominent Dodgers players from that time — Beltre’s teammates — were named in the report, including catchers Paul Lo Duca and Todd Hundley and pitchers Eric Gagne and Kevin Brown.

The Dodgers were “deeply implicated“, wrote the Los Angeles Times, adding: “The report shows that unnamed Dodgers officials had been highly suspicious, if not plainly aware, that steroids had become part of the Dodgers training regimen, at least where certain players were concerned.”

LoDuca, LAT wrote, had been “portrayed as both consumer and conduit of the drugs, the happy-to-oblige middleman between teammates and Kirk Radomski, a onetime New York Mets clubhouse worker and admitted steroid pusher”.

In 2012, in a memoir, Gagne wrote that “80 percent” of the Dodgers during the 2003/04 time frame were using PEDs. He did not name names.

So, back to Beltre.

The Dodgers perhaps were worried that Beltre (who denies ever having used PEDs) had stocked up on the PEDs in a salary drive in 2004 and would not be able to replicate the 2004 numbers. Plus, perhaps they didn’t want to pay him $64 million and/or thought 2004 was just a fluke year, PEDs or otherwise.

Beltre’s first season in Seattle did not make club officials blush. He fell off to 69 runs, 19 homers, 87 batted in and a .303 OBP. Some Mariners fans were calling Beltre a bust.

But by 2006, Beltre moved his numbers north, and they were solid through his Seattle contract. He signed with the Red Sox and played one year in Boston, 2010, then got a long-term contract with the Rangers, in 2011, where he has been ever since — and once played in a World Series.

So, looking back, the man the Dodgers did not want to sign ahead of the 2005 season has, since then, racked up … 2,049 hits, including 307 home runs and 428 doubles, with 798 runs and 991 RBI.

Who also is now ranked 42nd, all-time, in WAR (wins above replacement), just behind Al Kaline and just ahead of Wade Boggs.

Who also racked up most of that WAR while the Dodgers played the following guys at third base: Mike Edwards, Oscar Robles, Wilson Betemit, Willy Aybar, Bill Mueller, Nomar Garciaparra, Blake DeWitt, Casey Black, Juan Uribe, Luis Cruz, Jerry Hairston and Justin Turner.

It is impossible to know what sort of career Adrian Beltre would have had playing third base in Los Angeles nonstop from 1998 to 2017. Perhaps he would have turned into a different player.

Or perhaps he would be about to get his 3,000th hit, all of them with the Dodgers, and the club already would be thinking about where it would display his (retired) jersey number, 29.

Even before his election to the Hall of Fame.