Report: Shohei Ohtani’s 50-50 Season Might Not Be First in MLB History

Throughout the 2024 Major League Baseball, Shohei Ohtani has been the headliner. As a two-way player focused on offense while recovering from Tommy John surgery, Ohtani was on pace to set records early.

On Thursday in Miami, he became the first player to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season. At least that’s what had been reported.

So, was Ohtani actually the first to reach this milestone?

When MLB officially recognized the statistics of Negro League players in May, dating back to 1920, they acknowledged that the data was incomplete. Researchers estimate that roughly 75 percent of the records from the 1920-48 Negro Leagues have been preserved.

But what unknown stories and achievements might be hidden in the remaining 25 percent?

Dodgers Nation reporter JP Hoornstra took it a step further by asking Adam Darowski, the Executive Director of Design & Product Management for Sports Reference, to help dive into the details of the Negro Leagues further.

What Darowski found was interesting.

To estimate the top candidates for a 50/50 season in Negro League history, Darowski referenced all players in the Baseball Reference database who had achieved at least 10 home runs and 10 stolen bases. He then prorated their stats to a 154-game season to make a numerical projection.

“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.”

There are two key points to consider here.

First, the missing data isn’t evenly spread across seasons. For example, there are records of 99 games Willie Wells played in 1929, but only 46 games for Mule Suttles in 1930.

Second, despite the fewer recorded games, Suttles may have actually played more games in 1930 than Wells did in 1929. MLB chose to include only the stats these players accumulated against other Negro League teams, but barnstorming tours were common at the time for financial 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.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Charleston, for instance, didn’t achieve a 50-50 season in 1927. It simply indicates that MLB may not have counted all the games in which he accumulated home runs and stolen bases. Both American and National League teams also played non-league games during the season for a while, but that practice had ended by the close of the 20th century.

The answer to the question of whether Ohtani’s 2024 season is truly the first 50-50 season in MLB history is a somewhat unsatisfying “as far as we know.” Even our 154-game projections for the top Negro League players don’t quite capture the full picture. For context, Ohtani himself was on pace for 52 home runs and 31 steals through the Dodgers’ first 84 games.

It’s possible that players like Charleston could have already joined the 50/50 club if they had the chance to play full 162-game seasons in league play—or, more importantly, if they had been allowed to compete against white players.

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