Munetaka Murakami, as Advertised

The book on Munetaka Murakami was pretty straightforward when he hit the market this winter. Phenomenal cosmic power – itty bitty contact rate. While acknowledging recent injuries, our writeup noted his contact rates against good velocity (63%) and secondary pitches (50%) as red flags in his profile. And these weren’t little red flags, either. As Eric and James put it, “…if Murakami is only ever the quality of contact hitter we’ve seen the last three years, with no changes or improvements, he basically can’t be a good MLB hitter.”

Through a month of play, Murakami has been a very good MLB hitter, with a 153 wRC+ driven by a 21.5% walk rate and eight homers. But he’s struggled with contact, and that’s putting it mildly. He’s striking out a third of the time so far, with the fourth-lowest contact rate in baseball through Sunday’s action. So what can we say about that? One answer is that it’s too soon to say – either his contact rate will go up or his production will go down. But that’s pretty unsatisfying. To be fair, it’s probably right, but that doesn’t make it satisfying. So let’s break his game down more granularly to see where the whiffs are coming from, where the power is coming from, and how the two are related.

We’ll start with the “can’t hit secondaries” part of the scouting report. In the early going, that has been abundantly clear. Sixty-six batters have swung at 25 or more sliders this season. Murakami’s 59.3% whiff rate is the third highest, behind Max Muncy The Younger and James Wood. If you broaden that out to all secondaries, 201 batters have offered at 50 or more secondary pitches this year. Murakami’s 53.3% whiff rate is the third highest of that group, behind only Matt Wallner and Daniel Schneemann.

Here’s a little secret, though: This matters less than you think. The top of that “least contact against secondaries” list has plenty of good hitters on it. In 2025, Aaron Judge finished sixth in this category. Nick Kurtz was eighth. Wood was 13th. Missing a lot is fine as long as you do two things: make the contact count, and avoid swinging at secondaries whenever you can.

It’s probably too early to tell if Murakami will be able to make his contact against secondaries count, though our own James Fegan wrote about his attempt to adjust to breaking balls for Sox Machine just yesterday. But not swinging at secondaries? Murakami has that down already. He chases secondaries out of the zone at a 28% clip – 70% of hitters chase more frequently. That explains an interesting disconnect. Murakami has terrible results when he swings at secondaries, racking up six runs below average per 100 swings. But if you look at his performance against secondaries overall, it’s totally unremarkable; 0.9 runs below average per 100 pitches. That’s because the correct thing to do against secondaries, in general, is to take them. Can pitchers counter by throwing you in-zone spin? Sure, but slow pitches thrown to where batters can crush them tends to be an unpopular plan among pitchers.

That first part of the Murakami scouting report – to quote Eric and James’ article, “Essentially, every secondary pitch type played like an elite offering against him in 2025” – is still true when he swings. His contact rates on those pitches are downright awful. When he has put them in play, he’s done some damage, but not enough to make up for how often he comes up empty. The exact thing that our team cautioned about is happening, but his own approach has cushioned the blow. Time to look at how he’s performing against high-velocity fastballs, then.

First, I split all the fastballs Murakami has faced this year by velocity and looked at the results:

Truthfully, that doesn’t look like someone who struggles with hard stuff. With so few batted balls, I like xwOBACON as a measure of contact quality more than the on-field results, and he’s running similar whiff rates against both categories of fastball as well. Here’s the league as a whole over the same splits:

Murakami swings and misses at fastballs a ton. But it’s not really a velocity thing; he comes up empty on his swings at slow fastballs 57% more frequently than the league as a whole, and comes up empty on his swings at fast fastballs 45% more frequently than the league as a whole. Against both fast and slow offerings, he has serious power when he connects; it’s far too early for even xwOBACON to stabilize, but those are big numbers, and his contact quality jumps off the page on a live look as well. You don’t end up with a 96th-percentile xSLG, a 97th-percentile exit velo, a 98th-percentile hard-hit rate, and a 99th-percentile barrel rate without putting a hurt on fastballs when you make contact with them.

Velocity splits are at least a little bit real. If you take the population of batters who saw 100 fastballs at 95 mph or harder in 2024 and 2025, their whiff rates on those pitches were stable from one year to the next. But their run values aren’t stable at all, with an r-squared near zero. If you swing and miss a lot at good fastballs in one year, you’re likely to in the next. But Murakami’s issue, at least stateside, hasn’t been an inability to turn fastballs around. He’s whiff-prone against heat, no doubt, but that’s because he’s whiff-prone against everything.

If you’re more of a granular, give me all the data type, here’s another way of putting it: Murakami has made fair contact against fastballs thrown 95 mph or harder eight times this year. He’s hit six of those balls 99.8 mph or harder, and five of them 104.9 mph or harder. He’s put six of eight in the air. He’s been late – hitting the ball to left field – exactly once. And the last high-velo fastball he put in play? It went quite a long way:

What does this all mean for Murakami? Well, it means that he’s going to continue to be a difficult player to evaluate. The strikeouts? They’re here to stay. This isn’t some early-season sample size issue. This is what it looks like when you take Murakami-sized hacks. There are plenty of hitters with similar approaches – swing really hard in case you make contact, essentially. Those guys tend to run huge strikeout rates, and huge walk rates if they have good plate discipline.

So far, Murakami’s plate discipline has been excellent. Only three players in all of baseball pair a lower chase rate with a higher in-zone swing rate. Those three guys aren’t quite power hitters, though: Gleyber Torres (.063 ISO), Miguel Vargas (.187 ISO), and Matt McLain (.040 ISO). Murakami is rocking a cool .333 ISO. If you dial things back to 2025, only Torres and Kyle Tucker chased less and swung more than Murakami, though Matt Chapman came close. I guess my point is that these are pretty good comparisons – if you don’t chase too much and also don’t get too passive, a low contact rate is less of a hindrance, particularly if you’re also swinging with power. The closest overall comp is probably Kyle Schwarber, and that’s an excellent player to resemble, because Schwarber is one of the best hitters in the game despite plenty of swing-and-miss.

In fact, I think that some of Murakami’s strikeouts are less about his swing and more about how fervently he follows his approach. Most hitters adjust their approach markedly when the count hits two strikes. League-wide in 2026, batters are chasing 24% of the time before reaching two strikes and 40% thereafter. Murakami chases 18% of the time before two strikes, and only 20% of the time afterwards. He chases equally as often whether he’s ahead or behind in the count, too. His fast-swing rate – the proportion of his swings that are 75 mph or faster – is narrowly ahead of Yordan Alvarez and Shohei Ohtani. He’s taking his “A” swing as much as possible, and keeping his approach fairly static, in other words. He doesn’t swing a ton and he doesn’t make a ton of contact when he swings, but he does hit the ball really hard when it works. It’s a pretty well-thought-out plan, in my opinion.

The encouraging news in all of this is that pitchers are the ones who need to make a change, not Murakami. Right now, he’s striking out a ton, sure, but he’s also absolutely demolishing the ball. He’s near the top of the league pretty much regardless of how you look at offense, and he’s actually underperforming his Statcast x-stats. A big reason for that is that pitchers keep attacking him in the heart of the plate, because he doesn’t chase much but does whiff a lot. But when you attack him in the heart of the plate, sometimes the ball ends up 450 feet away as a souvenir. If pitchers keep attacking him the way they have, I’m predicting plenty more strikeouts, but also plenty more homers. And what are they gonna do, leave the zone? He’s already walking 20% of the time.

Another way of thinking about this? The seven most powerful hitters of 2025, as measured by ISO, each had strikeout rates higher than league average. They all chased more than Murakami, and all made slightly more contact – they averaged a 70% contact rate overall, as compared to his 60%. But they also averaged a 150 wRC+. It’s acceptable to sell out for power as long as it doesn’t tank your approach, and thus far, Murakami has been phenomenal at sticking to his plan.

This definitely isn’t the end of the story. Murakami has been in the major leagues for less than a month. The book isn’t out on him. He’s facing pretty much everyone he sees for the first time, so he’s also learning on the fly. Baseball is a game of adjustments, and we haven’t even gotten to the first adjustment of his major league career yet. No one can say with certainty how things will pan out for him. But I do feel confident saying one thing. Right now, Murakami is one of the most whiff-prone hitters in baseball, and it hasn’t mattered even a little bit.