Shohei Ohtani’s historic 50-50 season questioned
By Bryan Ke
Questions are being raised whether Shohei Ohtani is the only MLB player to achieve 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in one season. The 30-year-old Los Angeles Dodgers two-way star achieved the milestone in one game against the Miami Marlins on Sept. 19, when he stole his 50th base in the first inning and hit his 50th home run in the seventh.
- Reviewing the data: Dodgers Nation, along with Adam Darowski, the executive director of design and product management for Sports Reference, analyzed available statistics of all players in the 1920-48 Negro League (NL) using the Baseball Reference database. Darowski first compiled all players who reached at least 10 home runs and 10 stolen bases for the analysis. He then calculated their stats over a 154-game season, which was the American League and National League standard at the time before switching to 162 games in 1962. “It’s hard to know how many non-league games they played, but at least this gives an idea of the pace,” Darowski said, noting the uneven record distribution in the database, such as how Mule Suttles and Willie Wells, both on a 40-home run, 40-stolen base pace, have 46 and 99 games, respectively.
- What they found: Darowski noted that Oscar Charleston of the Harrisburg Giants, whom he projected with 43 home runs and 57 stolen bases over a 154-game season in 1924, “seems like the best candidate.” However, the projections are inconclusive since NL players only competed within their league, and their seasons were much shorter, with 60 to 80 games compared to today’s 162. With those findings, Dodgers Nation concluded in its report that while Ohtani is “as far as we know” the first player to hit a 50-50 season in MLB history, the answer remains “dissatisfying” due to the incomplete records from the Negro Leagues.
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