Checking In on Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami, NPB’s Brightest Young Stars

There are not many subjects that baseball teams agree on, outside of not paying minor leaguers much money. One thing that 29 teams do share is an enormous amount of regret that they didn’t convince Shohei Ohtani to come join their franchise after the end of the 2017 season. (OK, 28 teams since the Orioles bizarrely refused to make a presentation on philosophical grounds, but I’d wager that the current front office would not have operated the same way!) In any case, major league teams and fans who pay attention regularly covet the biggest stars in NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball), and a small but steady flow of talent comes to the United States and Canada from overseas. So I wanted to take a look at two Japanese players who, while they may not be the next NPB stars to come to MLB due to the vagaries of the posting system, are the most exciting young players in the league right now: Tokyo Yakult Swallows third baseman Munetaka Murakami, and Chiba Lotte Marines righty Roki Sasaki.
It would be difficult to overstate how dominating Murakami has been at age 22, but I’m going to try my best to do so. Called up for a cup of coffee at 18 years old in 2018, he quickly became one of Japan’s best hitters, slugging 36 round-trippers at age 19 and putting up OPS figures of 1.012 and .974 in the two years since. Like MLB, NPB is at a fairly low offensive environment these days, though it’s unlikely the underlying causes are similar. The Central League — pretty much the last bastion if you like seeing pitchers hit — is only scoring 3.64 runs per game, its fewest since 2015. That hasn’t kept Murakami from not just finding another gear in 2022, but enough extra gears that it looks like he emptied out a bicycle shop.
At 52 homers, Murakami is not merely at the top of the standings; he is the standings. Only a single player in Japan, Hotaka Yamakawa, has even half the home run total (38). There are only two players within 300 points of his 1.229 OPS: Yamakawa (.988) and Masataka Yoshida (.952), and that’s while using a fairly generous plate appearance requirement (250 PA). In recent weeks, Murakami also set an NPB record by hitting home runs in five consecutive plate appearances.
Player | Age | PA | HR | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Munetaka Murakami | 22 | 529 | 52 | .339 | .473 | .756 | 1.229 |
Hotaka Yamakawa | 30 | 460 | 38 | .271 | .383 | .606 | .988 |
Masataka Yoshida | 28 | 438 | 14 | .322 | .441 | .511 | .952 |
Shugo Maki | 24 | 470 | 23 | .284 | .349 | .523 | .872 |
Sho Nakata | 33 | 310 | 18 | .290 | .356 | .515 | .871 |
Yoshihiro Maru | 33 | 541 | 24 | .276 | .374 | .493 | .867 |
Hiroaki Shimauchi | 32 | 525 | 14 | .309 | .388 | .479 | .867 |
Keita Sano | 27 | 471 | 18 | .314 | .361 | .503 | .864 |
Yusuke Ohyama | 27 | 453 | 23 | .272 | .363 | .497 | .860 |
Go Matsumoto | 28 | 397 | 3 | .352 | .400 | .442 | .842 |
Kensuke Kondoh | 28 | 330 | 6 | .295 | .401 | .433 | .834 |
Adam Walker | 30 | 373 | 20 | .276 | .308 | .518 | .827 |
Toshiro Miyazaki | 33 | 403 | 10 | .305 | .372 | .454 | .827 |
Takashi Ogino | 36 | 313 | 5 | .310 | .377 | .443 | .819 |
Hideto Asamura | 31 | 544 | 24 | .253 | .362 | .444 | .807 |
Tetsuto Yamada | 29 | 472 | 22 | .245 | .335 | .469 | .804 |
Teruaki Sato | 23 | 546 | 18 | .263 | .324 | .468 | .793 |
Yasutaka Shiomi | 29 | 491 | 13 | .274 | .349 | .444 | .793 |
Neftali Soto | 33 | 349 | 14 | .257 | .335 | .457 | .792 |
Ryoma Nishikawa | 27 | 360 | 9 | .299 | .344 | .446 | .791 |
Ryan McBroom | 30 | 464 | 15 | .270 | .353 | .436 | .790 |
Kazuma Okamoto | 26 | 523 | 25 | .250 | .331 | .453 | .783 |
Keita Nakagawa | 26 | 398 | 4 | .300 | .333 | .441 | .774 |
Yuki Yanagita | 33 | 404 | 16 | .268 | .334 | .439 | .773 |
Shogo Sakakura | 24 | 536 | 13 | .289 | .349 | .419 | .768 |
This type of home run dominance is rare, and Aaron Judge may be the first hitter in nearly a century to beat the runner-up by as large a margin as Murakami’s current one. OPS dominance to this degree is just as rare, even using the same liberal 250 plate appearance threshold rather than the official 3.1 plate appearances per team game, with only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds matching Murakami’s current edge. Read the rest of this entry »