Shohei Ohtani officially started the 50-50 club in a sport where no player in its more than 100-year history has hit more than 42 home runs and 42 stolen bases in a season.
For some players, this would be a career-defining achievement. For Ohtani, it is just another entry on a seemingly mythical resume.
The Los Angeles Dodgers star hit his 49th and 50th home runs and stole his 50th and 51st bases in a single game against the Miami Marlins on Thursday, making history with a 5-for-5 game with two doubles, two home runs, two steals and seven RBIs.
The last hit came in the seventh inning and gave him an away curtain call.
Because of this track record, Ohtani is the favorite to win his third MVP award, making him the only player other than Frank Robinson to win the award in both leagues.
Ohtani is doing all this in a season where he isn’t doing what made him the international face of baseball: hitting and throwing at the same time. His throwing arm is still on the mend after major UCL surgery at the end of last season, but by the end of August he had made progress in throwing.
Shohei Ohtani added another facet to his game and the result is 50-50
Even before this season, one could make a convincing argument that Ohtani is the most talented player in baseball history, at least in terms of his technical ability.
He can clearly hit and hit with power. As a pitcher, his four-seam fastball and sweeper are elite throws, followed by a cutter, sinker, curveball and splitter. He even had his moments with his glove and arm while playing right field in Japan.
It’s no exaggeration to call him an “eight-tool player.” It might even be conservative.
Ohtani’s speed, however, was the most erratic. At 6’4″ and 215 pounds, he’s considered a big man even by baseball standards, and he’s faster than a big man should be. He’s spent much of his career in the top quarter of sprint speed among MLB players, though that’s always seemed like a footnote on an already long page.
Ohtani had tried to use that speed on the basepaths in the past, with mixed results. His previous career high in stolen bases was 26 in 2021, his first MVP year, but he was also tied with the MLB leader with 10 missed attempts. His career success rate before 2024 was 72.3%, a rate that will lead many sabermetricians to advise you to stop bothering with stealing bases.
This year, things have changed. Ohtani managed 50 stolen bases with only four missed hits, so he has not only increased his stolen base count but also his efficiency. The larger bases and restrictions on pickoff attempts introduced in MLB last year have undoubtedly helped as well.
While it would be easy to attribute this to Dodger manager Dave Roberts, a speedster in his playing days and responsible for perhaps the most famous base-stealing case in MLB history, it is reportedly Ohtani’s working relationship with Dodgers first-base coach Clayton McCullough that helped him become a real problem on the basepaths.
From Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic:
“With (Ohtani), I don’t know if you can be surprised,” McCullough said. “Like everything else he does, he focuses on something, he’s in it and he picks things up during the game. We watched videos beforehand and he helped me a lot. We analyze things and I fixate on something and then he’ll say something like, look at this or look at that.
“I think he’s always studied these things. I think now that he has less on his plate in terms of preparation and pitching, he can focus more on that.”
So not only is Ohtani one of the best hitters in MLB and one of the best pitchers when healthy, but he’s now one of the best baserunners, a change he made in his 30th season. You could attribute that to the change of scenery from the Angels to the Dodgers, or perhaps the opportunity for Ohtani to focus on something else after spending a year away from pitching.
Above all, credit must be given to Ohtani, whose talent has once again enabled him to achieve something unprecedented.
Dodgers’ $700 million investment in Shohei Ohtani has paid off well so far
In his first year with the Dodgers, Ohtani hit 50 home runs and 51 steals, stayed healthy for one of baseball’s most injury-plagued teams, and became a promotional machine for one of the richest teams in the sport.
We’d call that a good start, even though the team had to weather the Ippei Mizuhara scandal, which saw Ohtani face troubling 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 feels so long ago that Ohtani’s $700 million contract value was announced, and he fell like a boulder onto the shard of glass that fans considered an understanding of how athletes’ contracts work. His sizable financial deferrals softened the blow to the Dodgers’ business side, but the record-breaking deal still made him the only baseball player not allowed to have a bad year.
And Ohtani didn’t. Instead, he’s the clear favorite for National League MVP honors and will make his MLB playoff debut in his seventh major league season, accomplishing something that seemed nearly impossible before this summer.
