On 21 November 2024, Shohei Ohtani was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player — decisively, unanimously, and historically. The award marked his third career MVP and made him only the second player in Major League Baseball history, after Frank Robinson, to win the honour in both the American and National leagues.
A unanimous vote across the league
The Baseball Writers’ Association of America left no doubt. Every first-place vote landed on Ohtani, delivering the first unanimous NL MVP award of his career after his move to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The decision confirmed what a season of rewritten record books had already made plain.
No other player had ever combined 50 home runs with 50 stolen bases in a single campaign. Ohtani did it with numbers to spare, closing the regular season at 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases, a pairing so improbable it had stood beyond the reach of every hitter for more than a century.
From a 50-50 season to a World Series title
The MVP ballot arrived as the capstone to a year in which Ohtani transformed his new league. Barely a month earlier, he had helped the Dodgers defeat the New York Yankees four games to one, claiming his first World Series ring. That title, clinched on 30 October, gave the voting panel the final piece of a case too weighty to split.
Ohtani’s two earlier MVP awards — both unanimous, both in the American League — had already set him apart. In 2021 he became the first unanimous AL MVP since Mike Trout seven years before; in 2023 he repeated the sweep, the first player ever to take the award unanimously twice.
A pioneer’s place in the record
Adding the 2024 NL trophy pushed his personal count to three, and it placed him beside a single name in the sport’s archive. Frank Robinson, who won the NL MVP with Cincinnati in 1961 and the AL MVP with Baltimore in 1966, had stood alone in the dual-league club for nearly six decades. Ohtani’s entry rewrites that quiet record and underlines a career that has long stopped resembling any other.
He was already the first two-way player to headline a modern rookie class, taking the 2018 AL Rookie of the Year award. Five autumns later, a bat and a path through two leagues built a case no voter could resist.
A fourth unanimous MVP would follow in the autumn of 2025, but the 2024 vote was the one that brought Ohtani across baseball’s oldest divide.
