Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.
Dodgers megastar Shohei Ohtani is likely to become the first member of the 50-50 club this season. As you all know, that is 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season. The only players to previously get to even the 40-40 club were Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano and Ronald Acuña Jr. None of them made it to 45 homers and steals while Ohtani has already whizzed past both marks.
Let's latch onto Mr. Acuña there, as last season he became the first player ever to hit 40 homers and steal 70 bases. Now there's Ohtani's run at 50-50 this season. Instead of joy and admiration, instead we're inundated with complaints that steals are much easier to come by now and that means these records aren't worth great celebration. I've already started to see talk of asterisks and heard plenty of pushback on the historic nature of these two feats.
Remember, there were rules changes -- the bases got bigger and pickoff throws to first base became limited -- prior to last season in an effort to increase stolen bases. And they have. In 2022, the last year before the changes, we saw 0.51 stolen bases by team per game. This season it's 0.74.
The theory here for the haters -- who are apparently sick of hearing about Ohtani instead of enjoying an all-time great run -- is that since it's so much easier to steal bases, this doesn't really count as much as if it happened a few years ago.
The problem here in terms of the actual stats is the stolen base rate isn't astronomical. It's simply returned to levels of the 1980s and 1990s, really. That doesn't mean stealing bases is easy. If that were the case, why doesn't the leader have more than 62? Why have only three players passed 40? Only nine have more than 30. That isn't excessive.
Look at the 40-40 seasons before the rule changes along with the stolen base rates.
- Canseco did it in 1988, when there were 0.79 steals per game per team, meaning it was a better climate for stolen bases than for Ohtani, in theory.
- Bonds' year, 1996, had a rate of 0.71, which is pretty negligible.
- A-Rod, 1998, 0.68 says he was very impressive there, but it wasn't a ton different than the 0.74 today.
- Soriano in 2006 appears to be the most impressive at 0.57 stolen bases per game league-wide.
There's nothing there suggesting that stolen bases have exploded to the point that we should ignore or give a collective yawn to records these days.
Plus, the feat here is the power-speed combination and what Ohtani is doing is worth some jaw-dropping admiration. My plea is to avoid getting numb to the things he's doing. Once he reaches the 50-50 club, not only will he be the first to ever do it in a season, but, via my colleague Mike Axisa, "he'll be only the third player with a 50-homer season and a 50-steal season at any point in his career. Only Bonds (73 homers in 2001, 52 steals in 1990) and Brady Anderson (50 homers in 1996, 53 steals in 1992) have done it."
That's worth plenty of adulation.
On top of that, no other player to reach 50 home runs in a season has even remotely come close to this level of base-stealing.
There have been 49 50-homer seasons in MLB history. If Ohtani gets to 50 homers, this will only be the fifth time in history a player went 50-20! No one has ever even gone 50-25 before. Here are the best stolen base seasons among 50-homer hitters.
Player | Year | Home runs | Stolen bases |
Alex Rodriguez | 2007 | 54 | 24 |
Willie Mays | 1955 | 51 | 24 |
Brady Anderson | 1996 | 50 | 21 |
Ken Griffey Jr. | 1998 | 56 | 20 |
Sammy Sosa | 1998 | 66 | 18 |
Alex Rodriguez | 2001 | 52 | 18 |
Of those 49 50-homer seasons, the player has only gotten to double digits in stolen bases 14 times.
Now, let's go the opposite way. Let's look at players with at least 50 steals and how many home runs they hit. A lot more players have reached 50 steals than 50 homers, but we've only seen 22 players steal 50 bases and slug at least 20 home runs. Only three went 30-50 (Acuña, Bonds and Eric Davis).
And, again, we're talking about Shohei Ohtani getting to 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases. It isn't cheap. He's second in the majors in both categories.
My conclusion on Ohtani stealing so many more bases isn't the rule changes (he stole only 20 bases last season), but instead his increased freshness due to not pitching once every five or six days. Still, does it even matter? He's doing something we've never seen before. That's fantastic theater.
The big crime here from Ohtani is that he's already won two MVPs and gets so much attention that some people are tired of hearing about him. That's always an issue in this day and age between the 24/7 news cycle, the internet, social media, talk radio, etc. People get oversaturated with information about a certain player and the hate -- or even a numb indifference -- naturally comes next. It's part of the cycle.
I'm generally perfectly fine with the whole, "I'm so sick of hearing about [insert anyone or anything, really]!" because, like I said, it's a natural feeling. It happens to me often in other sports where I'm simply a fan. I get it.
It's also a good way to deprive yourself of enjoying the greatness on display in front of us.
Ohtani is about to become the first DH to ever win MVP. He's already won two MVPs as a two-way player. He's going to become the first player to ever have 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season. It's OK to acknowledge how cool that is.
Why deprive yourself of the enjoyment with negativity? The Snyder Soapbox plea: Don't let yourself get numb. It's a historically amazing ride. Sit back and just have fun witnessing the greatness.
