Shohei Ohtani has officially founded the 50-50 club in a sport in which no player had posted more than 42 home runs and 42 stolen bases in the same season in its century-plus history.
For some players, this would be a career-defining achievement. For Ohtani, it’s just one more entry on a mythical-seeming résumé.
The Los Angeles Dodgers star hit his 49th and 50th homer and stole his 50th and 51st base all in a single game against the Miami Marlins on Thursday, bursting into history with a 5-for-5 game with two doubles, two homer, two steals and seven RBI.
The final blow came in the seventh inning, earning him a curtain call on the road.
That history sets Ohtani up as the favorite to win his third career MVP award, which would also have him join Frank Robinson as the only players to win the award in both leagues.
Ohtani is accomplishing all this in a season in which he isn’t doing what made him the international face of baseball: hitting and pitching at the same time. His throwing arm is still on the mend after undergoing major UCL surgery at the end of last season, but he’d progressed to throwing by the end of August.
Shohei Ohtani added another facet to his game, and the result is 50-50
Even before this season, a very compelling argument could be made that Ohtani is the most talented player in the history of baseball, at least from a pure tools standpoint.
He can clearly hit and hit for power. As a pitcher, his four-seam fastball and sweeper are elite pitches, with a cutter, sinker, curveball and splitter behind them. He even had his moments with his glove and arm when he played right field in Japan.
It’s not hyperbole to call him an eight-tool player. It might actually be conservative.
Ohtani’s speed, though, was the most mercurial. At 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds, he qualifies as a large man even by baseball standards, and he’s faster than any large man should be. He has spent much of his career in Statcast’s top quartile of sprint speed among MLB players, though it always seemed like a footnote on an already long page.
Ohtani had tried in the past to use that speed on the basepaths, with mixed results. His previous career high in stolen bases was 26 in 2021, his first MVP year, but he also tied for the MLB lead in failed attempts, with 10. His career success rate before 2024 was 72.3%, a rate that will cause many sabermetricians to tell you to stop bothering with stealing bases.
Something changed this year. Ohtani reached 50 stolen bases with only four failures, so he vastly increased not only his volume of stealing but also his efficiency. MLB’s increased base sizes and restrictions on pickoff attempts, instituted last year, no doubt also helped.
While it would be easy to credit the presence of Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, a speedster in his playing days who is responsible for possibly the most famous stolen base in MLB history, it is reportedly Ohtani’s work with Dodgers first-base coach Clayton McCullough that has helped him become a legitimate problem on the basepaths.
From The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya:
“With [Ohtani], I don’t know if you can be surprised,” McCullough said. “Like anything else he does, he puts his mind on something, he’s in and picks up things during the game. We’re watching video before, and he’s helped me a ton. We’re breaking things down, and I’ll get fixated on something, and then he’s like, look at this or that.
“I think he’s always been a student of these things. I think now with having less on his plate from a preparation standpoint and the pitching, more focus can be put on it.”
So in addition to being one of the best hitters in MLB and one of its best pitchers when healthy, Ohtani is now one of its best baserunners, a change he made in his age-30 season. You can credit the change of scenery from the Angels to the Dodgers or perhaps the opportunity for Ohtani to focus on something else with pitching out of the way for a year.
Most of all, you have to credit Ohtani, whose talent has again allowed him to do something unprecedented.
Dodgers’ $700 million investment in Shohei Ohtani has paid off well so far
In Year 1 with the Dodgers, Ohtani has 50 homers, 51 steals, stayed healthy for one of the most injury-plagued teams in baseball and become an advertising juggernaut for one of the richest teams in sports.
We’d call that a good start, even if the team had to weather the Ippei Mizuhara scandal, in which Ohtani faced concerning questions about his former interpreter’s gambling addiction before emerging completely unscathed in the eyes of the U.S. Department of Justice, the IRS and MLB.
It already feels so long ago that Ohtani’s $700 million contract value was reported, dropping like a boulder onto the shard of glass that was fans’ understanding of how athlete contracts worked. His considerable financial deferrals softened the blow for the Dodgers’ business side, but the record-shattering deal still positioned him as the one player in baseball who was not allowed to have an off-year.
And Ohtani didn’t. Instead, he is the clear MVP front-runner in the National League and set to make his MLB playoff debut in his seventh big-league season, having achieved something that sounded nearly impossible before this summer.
