Is Shohei Ohtani’s 50-50 Season Actually The First in MLB History?

It has been repeated so often, it practically goes without saying: when Shohei Ohtani stole his 50th base and hit his 50th home run of the season last Thursday in Miami, he did something no player in the history of Major League Baseball had ever done before.

Or did he?

When Major League Baseball incorporated the “official” statistics of Negro League players in May dating back to 1920, the league acknowledged those statistics were incomplete. Researchers estimate that the 1920-48 Negro Leagues records are about 75 percent complete. What mysteries lie in that extra 25 percent?

Dodgers Nation put that question to Adam Darowski, the Executive Director of Design & Product Management for Sports Reference, which has incorporated available Negro Leagues stats into Baseball Reference.

In an attempt to make a numerical estimate for the top 50/50 candidates in the Negro League record book, Darowski cited all players who recorded a 10-homer, 10-steal season in the Baseball Reference database and prorated their numbers to a 154 game pace.

Here’s what — or rather, who — he found:

“It’s hard to know how many non-league games they played,” Darowski noted. “But at least this gives an idea of the pace. Charleston still seems like the best candidate.”

Two things are worth noting here.

For one, the missing data is not evenly distributed. That’s why we have record of 99 games Willie Wells played in 1929 and only 46 games Mule Suttles played in 1930.

For another, Suttles might have played more games in 1930 than Wells did in 1929. MLB made the conscious decision to include only stats these players compiled against other Negro League teams. But in-season “barnstorming tours” were more common then for economic reasons. As MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince explains:

Because of the times, Negro Leagues teams often had to resort to barnstorming exhibitions to keep the business afloat or cut their seasons short when they were out of contention, leading to erratic league schedules.

That doesn’t mean that Charleston, for example, didn’t actually get to 50-50 in 1927. It just means MLB might not have counted all the games in which he racked up homers and steals. American and National League teams played non-league games in-season too for a time, but that practice was discontinued by the end of the 20th century.

So the answer to our original question — is Ohtani’s 2024 season actually the first 50-50 season in MLB history — is a dissatisfying “as far as we know.” Even our 154-game projections for the best Negro League players are somewhat unfair. Ohtani himself was on pace for 52 homers and 31 steals through the Dodgers’ first 84 games.

Ohtani might have had company in the 50-50 club already if players like Charleston were allowed to play 162-game seasons in league play. Or, better yet, if they were allowed to play against white players.

Photo Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

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