Shohei Ohtani’s first season with the Dodgers has basically been perfect. He’s the first player in major league history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a season. He leads the NL in runs, RBI, total bases, slugging percentage, and OPS.

There’s one other way in which Ohtani’s season has been perfect and we thank a baseball fan named Elliott, who wrote in to the podcast Effectively Wild, to remind us. Ohtani has had 79 competitive slides into a base this season (not including pickoffs). All 79 have been what we refer to as normal feet-first slides.

This isn’t new. In fact, it dates back to Ohtani’s time playing in Japan, when his team, the Nippon-Ham Fighters, banned headfirst sliding.

Sports Info Solutions has done complete tracking of slides by type since 2021. We track slides on all balls hit to the infield, all balls hit to the outfield in which there is a long throw or relay to a base, stolen bases, and slides of any other type that result in injury.

Ohtani has slid feet first 98% of the time (220 times out of 224 slides) in that span. He had 3 true head-first slides and one of what we categorize as hook slide, hand reach.

Here’s a list of players with at least 20 slides this season who have used a normal feet-first slide the most frequently.

Highest Percentage of Normal Feet-First Slides

Minimum 20 Slide Attempts

Going back to last season, Corbin Carroll —who has 61 feet-first slides out of 62 total slides this season—has slid feet first 144 times and head-first only twice.

In contrast to this, Ronald Acuña Jr. slid into a base 19 times this season prior to his injury and never slid in a normal feet-first manner. He had 16 head-first slides and 3 hook slide, hand reaches (these start as feet-first slides). This wasn’t anything new for Acuña, who slid feet first only 7% of the time in 2023.

Mike Trout, before his season ended, had 1 feet-first slide and 8 head-first slides. That was a significant change in approach for Trout, who slid feet first on 23 of his 25 slides in 2023.

Among players with more than 20 slides, José Caballero is the most frequent at sliding in what we categorize as a normal head-first slide, doing so 88% of the time. Four players slide head first 80% of the time or higher: Caballero, Johan Rojas (84%), David Hamilton (82%), and Dairon Blanco (81%). MLB’s most prolific basestealer, Elly De La Cruz, slides that way 74% of the time.

The average major leaguer has slid feet first 62% of the time this season, head-first 34% of the time. The other 4% is hook slide, hand reach (3%), swim moves (1%), and hook slide, foot reach (less than 1%). Hook slide with a hand reach is used most often on slides into home plate, accounting for 14% of those slides.

If you’re curious how often a player slides feet first by base, here’s the data on that.

Type of Slide By Base- 2024 Season

SIS also tracks injury type and severity for all plays (including slides). Over the last four seasons, there have been 122 injuries recorded on slides, 67 on feet-first, 48 on head-first and 7 on hook slide, hand reach. That’s a rate of 5.6 injuries per 1,000 slides on the hook, hand reach slides, 3.6 on head first, and 2.3 on feet first.

However, this season, there have been more than twice as many injuries on feet-first slides (29) as head-first ones (14). The injury rate this year for head-first slides is 3.6 per 1,000 but the injury rate on feet first is 4.1, more than double what it was from 2021 to 2023.