Forget what the scouting report said about Munetaka Murakami before he came over to MLB from the NPB. As we all know, foreign scouting is not real. Big bombs are real, and Murakami has, in his three most recent games games with the Chicago White Sox, delivered three big bombs. One of them even had the additional oomph of being his first career grand slam.
Let’s start with the most basic metrics. Murakami has a .916 OPS, which is good for a 161 OPS+, or 61-percent better than the average MLB hitter. That’s very impressive offensive production. So far this year, he is striking out 33 percent of the time (truly abysmal) and walking 21.5 percent of the time (outstanding). If that isn’t enough, his .208 average is an indication that he is a extremely three-true-outcomes style of hitter. Seeing as his spray chart looks like this, it’s true:
The bulk of Murakami’s strengths and weaknesses can be gleaned from the three-true-outcomes label. To reiterate some of the scouting that led to his meager two-year, $34 million contract, Murakami had an outrageously pessimistic contact rate on pitches inside the zone, at 72.6 percent. There were similar concerns with Shohei Ohtani, though Ohtani was younger at the time, and Murakami’s strikeout trends looked ominous. However, the power was never in doubt: His 56 homers in 2022 broke the NPB’s single-season home run record.
Validating some of the concerns, Murakami’s contact metrics have translated over to MLB, and then some. He has an in-zone contact percentage of 68.5 which, along with his overall whiff percentage of 41.7, is second-worst in the league, ahead of only Seattle Mariners right fielder Luke Raley (59.0 percent and 47.7 percent, respectively). But underlying metrics do not, in the short term, always translate neatly onto on-field results. Validating the upside, Murakami is 92nd-percentile in batting run value with six runs. He is seeing a lot of fastballs and catching up to the velocity fine. Results-wise, he’s doing enough.
By looking at Murakami’s swing-take metrics, we can see how he is generating those runs, with pitches broken down into four categories: in the heart of the zone, the shadow (including pitches both just inside and just outside the zone), chase pitches, and waste pitches. Despite his bang-bang power, Murakami so far is losing runs on pitches in the heart of the zone. He swings an about average amount compared to the rest of MLB, and sees a slightly higher percentage of pitches there than average. Having just watched Murakami destroy two absolute meatballs down the middle of the plate, we know what he can produce when he makes contact. The question, of course, is whether he can.
Still, Murakami is more than making up for it by taking pitches outside of the zone. He swings a below-average amount on shadow, chase, and waste pitches, with shadow (42 percent compared to league average of 53 percent) and chase (15 percent compared to a league average of 26 percent) being big outliers. He has been hugely productive in both the chase and waste parts of the zone; his approach to the shadow is intriguing so far as it has resulted in a totally neutral number of runs generated in that area.
Generating negative offense by swinging at pitches and positive offense by taking pitches is an identifiable pattern of other three-true-outcomes guys, even the extremely good ones, such as 2024 Kyle Schwarber or 2017 Joey Gallo. Comparing 2026 Murakami to those two players is also intriguing. Perhaps it’s nitpicking to note that 2024 (and 2025) Schwarber and 2017 Gallo had their greatest losses at pitches in the shadow of the zone, but were still able to be productive on pitches down the heart of the plate (while this changes year-to-year, the best seasons follow this pattern); and that Murakami so far splitting from that pattern is a strange, if not necessarily negative, indicator at this stage of the season. Schwarber and Gallo have also panned out to be two very different calibers of player. For Schwarber in particular, his zone contact performance has never dipped under 75 percent since he became a productive MLB hitter. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Munetaka Murakami in April of his first MLB season to a player who finished second in MVP voting in 2025.
The truth of three-true-outcomes players is that they are easy to resent years down the line, and easy to adore early in their careers, when big homers are the best. We will always have the tale of Yermín Mercedes to caution against setting much stock by a single month of a White Sox player’s career, before opposing teams have much data to work with. When comparisons roll in, the sample-size child begins to wail: Murakami is on pace to hit nearly 60 home runs; will we believe that too?
Maybe Murakami will start seeing more breaking balls and suffer for it. Maybe he’ll turn around his performance in the strike zone. At any rate, Murakami has done enough this April to be worth watching, and that’s all one can ask for at this point in the season. Or, hey, maybe, against all odds, he’ll keep whiffing 40 percent of the time and still homer on more than half his hits. I’d take that trade-off.