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.

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.

After translating Murakami’s 2020 and ’21 into relatively normal triple-slashes (.263/.346/.469 and .252/.340/.466), he gets a bonafide star-level translation this year with a year-end estimate of .273/.355/.574 with 45 homers. That’s not his baseline, but it makes for quite the spicy ZiPS projection:

As an offensive player, Murakami’s top ZiPS comps are Harlond Clift, Robin Ventura, Aramis Ramirez, Evan Longoria, and Ken Keltner, among others. I imagine most MLB teams would be happy to sign any of those players — I mean, theoretically; Ventura is 55, and Clift would have just celebrated his 110th birthday.

Sasaki is making a similar splash this year in his first full season in the top league. He doesn’t turn 21 until November, yet is dominating hitters in Japan to the degree that a healthy Jacob deGrom does over here. A well-built pitcher at 6-foot-3 and nearly 200 pounds, Sasaki has struck out 162 batters in 118 1/3 innings against 20 walks, good for a 2.05 ERA. Only Yoshinobu Yamamoto, another player who may come to MLB at some point, has more strikeouts (172), but he needed 45 more innings to get those 10 extra whiffs.

Back in April, Sasaki threw a perfect game, the first in the NPB majors since 1994, striking out 19 batters along the way. And then he almost did it again, throwing eight perfect innings the following game and striking out 14 before he was pulled in the ninth. I imagine pulling a pitcher in the ninth for a second consecutive perfect game attempt might lead to an actual revolt here! Here’s a fun video of all 19 of his strikeouts.

Oh, did I mention that Sasaki can hit 102 mph with his fastball? He throws an occasional curve or slider, but the usual accompaniment is, depending on your opinion, either a tumbling splitter or a hard forkball (in truth, these pitches are more on a spectrum to each other than being bonafide different pitches). He’s even got a solid nickname already: “The Monster of Reiwa Era,” referring to the current era name in Japan since the crowning of a new emperor in 2019. (Seunghwan Oh, The Final Boss, is still my favorite in that regard, though.)

Overall, ZiPS translates Sasaki’s 2022 as easily MLB quality, with an ERA/FIP right around 3.00 and well over a strikeout per inning. The projection isn’t quite as optimistic, but that’s largely because he’s still a very young pitcher without a whole lot of experience, which increases the uncertainty no matter how good you are.

In the U.S., Sasaki would easily be the best pitching prospect in baseball. As with Murakami, if he expressed a desire to play here sooner than his free agency, and his franchise were open to the notion, all 30 teams should have a great deal of interest in spending a great deal of money to get his services.

It’s likely going to be several years until there’s even a chance that we get to see Murakami or Sasaki in the majors. But our loss is Japan’s gain, and any serious baseball fan should be keeping track of the exploits of these two players in NPB.