Will Shohei Ohtani Go 50-50? And If So, When?

Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

There are a lot of great baseball storylines to keep tabs on this month. Aaron Judge is on yet another historic tear. Bobby Witt Jr. and the Royals are crashing the playoff party. The Brewers and Guardians are showing the league that you overlook the Central divisions at your own peril. But it all pales in comparison to Shohei Ohtani’s pursuit of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases, at least for me.

The 50-50 club doesn’t have any members. Ohtani is alone in the 44-44 club, the highest current rung he’s attained, and it doesn’t look like anyone else will be joining him anytime soon. Ohtani himself probably won’t repeat this; this is a career high in steals by a mile, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happening in a season when he isn’t pitching. Next year, I think that he’ll rein himself in more, but right now, we’re seeing what it looks like when a fast player decides that they really do want to steal all the bases they can. Of course, it helps that he’s also one of the most powerful hitters in the game – both to aim for the 50-50 target and because opposing pitchers walk him quite often.

Will he make it? I’m not sure, but luckily I have a method that lets me estimate the odds. When Judge hit 62 homers two years ago, I built a little tool to estimate the likelihood of him hitting that milestone, as well as the chances of it happening in any particular game. That method works pretty well in general, so I redid it with a few modifications to handle the fact that we’re looking at two counting statistics instead of just one. I’ll start by reviewing the methodology, though if you’re not into that, there are some tables down below that will give you an idea of when and where Ohtani might hit (or run into) this momentous milestone.

I started with our Depth Charts projection for Ohtani’s home run rate the rest of the way. That’s based on neutral opposition, so I also took opposing pitching staffs into account, as well as park factors for lefty home run rate. Lefties hit more homers in Dodger Stadium (12 remaining games) than in Truist Park (three remaining games), and batters hit more homers against the Rockies (six remaining games) than the Padres (three remaining games). I used park factor and opposition strength to modify Ohtani’s baseline home run rate and create a unique home run rate for each remaining game. I then picked a random number of plate appearances (four, five, or six, with five the most frequent) for each game.

The Dodgers will likely give Ohtani at least one day off the rest of the season, so I built that into my calculations. I don’t know which day it will be specifically, so I had my simulation pick a random day in Los Angeles’ upcoming 10-games-in-10-days stretch. I also made a slight adjustment to better reflect reality: Instead of having a static home run rate, Ohtani’s true home run talent fluctuates randomly around his projected rate, which means that sometimes he hits home runs 8% of the time in this simulation, while sometimes it’s closer to 5%.

Projecting the chances of him hitting 50 homers is pretty easy that way. The distribution of possible games he’ll do it in looks like this:

Shohei Ohtani, 50th Homer Odds
Day Opponent Home/Away Odds of 50th HR Cumulative Odds
9/6 Guardians Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/7 Guardians Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/8 Guardians Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/9 Cubs Home 0.1% 0.1%
9/10 Cubs Home 0.3% 0.5%
9/11 Cubs Home 0.7% 1.2%
9/13 Braves Away 0.8% 2.0%
9/14 Braves Away 1.1% 3.1%
9/15 Braves Away 1.5% 4.5%
9/16 Braves Away 1.8% 6.3%
9/17 Marlins Away 2.8% 9.2%
9/18 Marlins Away 3.4% 12.6%
9/19 Marlins Away 4.0% 16.6%
9/20 Rockies Home 5.5% 22.1%
9/21 Rockies Home 6.0% 28.2%
9/22 Rockies Home 6.3% 34.5%
9/24 Padres Home 5.5% 40.0%
9/25 Padres Home 5.4% 45.5%
9/26 Padres Home 5.3% 50.8%
9/27 Rockies Away 5.6% 56.4%
9/28 Rockies Away 5.3% 61.7%
9/29 Rockies Away 4.9% 66.5%

That’s not the question we’re asking, though. Fifty homers is cool but hardly unheard of. We’re hunting for 50-50 seasons. To do that, I added a second counter for stolen bases. I didn’t use park and team factors here, I just took a projected steal rate for Ohtani and applied it to the remaining games. I did make one modification, though. Obviously Ohtani can’t steal a base if he hits a homer, so I subtracted each game’s homer total from its plate appearance total for the stake of modeling stolen bases. In other words, if he batted five times and hit two homers, I’d only simulate a chance of a steal in the remaining three PAs.

From there, things are pretty easy. When sim-Ohtani hits his 50th homer, the simulation checks to see if he already has 50 steals. If he does, that game is his 50-50 day. If he doesn’t, then the simulation for stolen bases for that day runs. On the day of his 50th steal, the same thing happens in reverse – if he already has 50 homers, then that’s the day he hits 50-50. If not, the simulation keeps going. In this way, we can get the joint odds of the two things happening instead of the independent odds of each one.

The sum probability of Ohtani hitting both totals is around 56%. That makes intuitive sense to me – we’re projecting him for 50 homers and 51 steals, and I think the remaining parks and opponents bias the home run total upward. The joint probability can’t be much more than 50%, but I don’t think it should be much less either, given that he’s pretty likely to hit the steals total. I peg those odds at around 84%. That’s higher than you’d expect from our projections, but a lot of stolen base rate comes down to intent, and I’m fairly sure that Ohtani intends to steal 50 bases this year, so his go rate is likely higher than our naive projections.

The distribution of days where Ohtani might go 50-50 looks like this:

Shohei Ohtani, 50-50 Odds
Day Opponent Home/Away Odds of 50-50 Cumulative Odds
9/6 Guardians Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/7 Guardians Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/8 Guardians Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/9 Cubs Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/10 Cubs Home 0.0% 0.0%
9/11 Cubs Home 0.0% 0.1%
9/13 Braves Away 0.1% 0.2%
9/14 Braves Away 0.2% 0.4%
9/15 Braves Away 0.4% 0.8%
9/16 Braves Away 0.7% 1.4%
9/17 Marlins Away 1.2% 2.6%
9/18 Marlins Away 1.8% 4.4%
9/19 Marlins Away 2.4% 6.8%
9/20 Rockies Home 3.7% 10.4%
9/21 Rockies Home 4.6% 15.0%
9/22 Rockies Home 5.3% 20.3%
9/24 Padres Home 5.3% 25.6%
9/25 Padres Home 5.7% 31.4%
9/26 Padres Home 5.9% 37.3%
9/27 Rockies Away 6.3% 43.6%
9/28 Rockies Away 6.1% 49.7%
9/29 Rockies Away 5.9% 55.6%

In other words, if you can only go to one game and want the best chance of seeing a record-setting event, you should go to the first game of the final series of the year in Colorado. If you only want to go to one series, it should be that one. Ohtani could certainly hit both totals earlier, but it’s difficult given that doing more of one event implies less of the other.

That’s not to say there’s no chance of an early milestone. There’s a roughly 7% chance that Ohtani hits both plateaus before the final homestand of the year begins on September 20, and a further 30% chance of him hitting it during those six home games. If I were hunting for a specific time to go see him, I’d pick that one: at home, against first a bad pitching staff and then a division rival.

One thing worth noting is that these odds can change fast. If Ohtani hits a homer and steals a base tomorrow night, the odds shoot up into the mid-70s immediately. The most likely time to see the 50-50 game moves up to the last game of the home Colorado series, with the stretch against the Padres not far behind. When you’re dealing with such rare events – no one hits a homer every night – a binge of a day or two can have a big effect.

Is this gospel? Obviously not – it’s a simple simulation meant to give you a rough idea, not me predicting the future with perfect clarity. But that rough idea is pretty cool. Ohtani might do the previously unthinkable and post the power-speed season that has been long rumored but never achieved. I absolutely want to know when that might be – and pinpointing it for fun is right up my alley.





Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Twitter @_Ben_Clemens.

54 Comments
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Ivan_GrushenkoMember since 2016
2 months ago

This is the best base ball player in history if one adjusts for strength of competition. Yes there was Tim Keefe 20 WAR and Babe Ruth 15 WAR and Josh Gibson 1.400 OPS and Sadaharu Oh 264 OPS+ but Ohtani seems like he can do anything with no limits

Psychic... Powerless...
2 months ago
Reply to  Ivan_Grushenko

I tend to agree, but Barry Bonds’ .609 OBP is also worthy of mention.

ed-ott
2 months ago

Only with the noted enhancement of said stat…..

ed-ott
2 months ago
Reply to  ed-ott

Meant to include “likely” before “enhancement”…… settle down folks.

Jon L.Member since 2016
2 months ago
Reply to  ed-ott

I don’t think there’s a person on the planet who 1) knows anything at all about this, 2) has a shred of integrity, and 3) thinks the enhancement was merely likely

Not to detract from Bonds’ extraordinary talent or the fact that Bonds on steroids was better than anyone else on steroids

FrancoeursteinMember since 2020
2 months ago
Reply to  ed-ott

Bonds was the perfect lab experiment. I’d love an alternate universe where Shohei is allowed to be raided to the gills. Hell, Aaron Judge too.

FrancoeursteinMember since 2020
1 month ago
Reply to  Francoeurstein

Roided*

Lanidrac
2 months ago

Well, that OBP was heavily enhanced by the ridiculous number of record-setting intentional walks he was given that year. Yes, intentional walks are partly a factor of how good a hitter is, but a number of other factors are also involved to the point that we can safely say that Bonds’s true talent level was nowhere near a .609 OBP.

rburgh
2 months ago
Reply to  Lanidrac

OK, if we remove all 120 if his IBB’s in that season, his triple slash is .362/.515/.812. That would be essentially the same OBP as his 2001 season, when he hit 73 HR. And it would still be the 16th best single-season OPS. Of those 16 seasons, Barry has 4, Babe has 3, Teddy Ballgame has 2, and the remaining 7 are parceled out one to a customer for Josh Gibson, Charlie Smith, John McGraw, Tetelo Vargas, Oscar Charleston, Ed Mayweather, and Sliding Billy Hamilton.

Vargas (137) and Mayweather (112) had theirs in very limited samples. Gibson, Smith, and Charleston had theirs in “full” Negro League seasons of arounds 300 PA’s. And Bonds had his 4 at ages 36 through 39; the only one of the guys to do it in MLB after their age 28 season was Williams, who had one of his in 1957 at age 38.

It’s absolutely scary to think what Barry would have done if he had started roiding in 1998 along with McGwire and Sosa; he would have been only 33 then and posted a line of .303/.438/.609-37-122 with 28 SB in 697 PA’s. Don’t even think to compare Ohtani’s level of hitting talent with Barry’s.

Lanidrac
2 months ago
Reply to  rburgh

I wasn’t comparing Ohtani to Bonds, just pointing out that Bonds wasn’t as good (although still spectacular) at getting on base in 2004 as his ridiculous .609 OBP suggests.

Shirtless George Brett
1 month ago
Reply to  rburgh

OK, if we remove all 120 if his IBB’s in that season, his triple slash is .362/.515/.812. 

Acting like it was only official IBB’s that were inflated by his PED use and the TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY TWO regular walks were totally normal is incredibly disingenuous.

Brian ReinhartMember since 2016
2 months ago
Reply to  Ivan_Grushenko

Yeah, I know he has no chance to build the best career by sheer accumulation of stats…but by sheer talent? He’s the guy.

Shirtless George Brett
2 months ago
Reply to  Brian Reinhart

Not only is he the guy but I dont think second place, whoever you think that might be, is even all that close.

Ivan_GrushenkoMember since 2016
2 months ago

The best 2 way players I can think of are Babe Ruth and Joe Rogan. There must be others who could have done it but were prevented from doing so by their team.

Maybe someone like Wes Ferrell could have done it. Or CC Sabathia. Rick Rhoden DH in a game.

Last edited 2 months ago by Ivan_Grushenko
Lanidrac
2 months ago
Reply to  Brian Reinhart

While not with stolen bases specifically, however, if either the Red Sox or the Yankees had fully committed to making Babe Ruth a two-way player, I think he was just as talented to be able to pull it off as both a superstar hitter and pitcher.

The only issue is that the DH didn’t exist back then.

Last edited 2 months ago by Lanidrac
dl80Member since 2020
2 months ago
Reply to  Ivan_Grushenko

Why are you using bWAR on Fangraphs?

Ivan_GrushenkoMember since 2016
2 months ago
Reply to  dl80

It amuses me — like a clown

Last edited 2 months ago by Ivan_Grushenko