Shohei Ohtani headlined the entire 2024 Major League Baseball season. As an offensive-focused two-way player recovering from Tommy John surgery, Ohtani was on pace to set early records.

On Thursday in Miami, he became the first player to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season. Or so it was reported.

Was Ohtani actually the first to reach this milestone?

When MLB officially recognized Negro League player statistics going back to 1920 in May, it acknowledged that the data was incomplete. Researchers estimate that about 75 percent of Negro League records from 1920 to 1948 have survived.

But what unknown stories and successes could be hidden in the remaining 25 percent?

Dodgers Nation reporter JP Hoornstra went a step further and asked Adam Darowski, Sports Reference’s Executive Director of Design & Product Management, to help dig deeper into the details of the Negro Leagues.

What Darowski discovered was interesting.

To determine the best candidates for a 50/50 season in Negro League history, Darowski looked at all players in the Baseball Reference database who had at least 10 home runs and 10 stolen bases. He then extrapolated their statistics to a 154-game season to create a numerical projection.

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

There are two important points to consider here.

First, the missing data is not evenly distributed across seasons. For example, there are records of 99 games played by Willie Wells in 1929, but only 46 games for Mule Suttles in 1930.

Second, despite the fewer number of recorded games, Suttles may actually have played more games in 1930 than Wells did in 1929. MLB chose to only include the statistics these players achieved against other Negro League teams, but for financial reasons, tours were common at the time. As Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com explains:

“Due to the times, Negro Leagues teams often had to resort to spectacular exhibition matches to keep business afloat or cancel their seasons when they were no longer in contention, resulting in irregular league schedules.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Charleston didn’t have a 50-50 season in, say, 1927. It just shows that MLB may not have counted all the games in which he hit home runs and stolen bases. Both the American League and National League played non-league games during the season for a time, but that practice ended toward the end of the 20th century.

The answer to 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 Negro League’s best players don’t quite capture the full picture. For comparison, Ohtani himself was on pace to hit 52 home runs and 31 steals in the Dodgers’ first 84 games.

It’s possible that players like Charleston would have already joined the 50/50 club if they had been given the chance to play full seasons of 162 league games – or, more importantly, if they had been allowed to compete against white players.