Phenomenal Cosmic Power, Itty Bitty Contact Rate: White Sox Sign Murakami

A new day dawned in Major League Baseball on Sunday, as the top international player in this free agent class has signed with — that’s right — someone other than the Dodgers!

The White Sox, yes, believe it or not, the White Sox, have landed Munetaka Murakami. Per Jeff Passan, the 25-year-old corner infielder, late of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows of NPB, will make $34 million over the next two seasons. We had him ranked 12th on our Top 50 Free Agents list, with an estimated contract AAV of $22 million. Ben Clemens predicted he’d get seven years, our readers six.

It’s one of the biggest discrepancies you’re likely to see, and for good reason. Murakami is, in my opinion, the no. 1 most interesting player in this class, and while I’m shocked his contract dropped this far below expectations, I’m not at all surprised by the extent to which he’s divided popular opinion.

Murakami is, undeniably, an exciting player. In 2022, as a 22-year-old, he hit .318/.458/.710 with 56 home runs in 141 games. I think it’s appropriate to sit for a moment and reckon with a .700 slugging percentage. We see guys slug .500 all the time, and .600 isn’t that much higher than .500, and by extension, .700 isn’t that much higher than .600, so is it really that big a deal?

Yes, it’s a big deal. Our NPB leaderboards only go back to 2019, but Murakami in 2022 was the only hitter to slug .700 in Japan’s top league in that time. There have only been 10 instances of a hitter slugging .700 in MLB in a 162-game season: Barry Bonds four times, Mark McGwire twice, Larry Walker twice, and Sammy Sosa and Aaron Judge once each.

All of those required extenuating circumstances. Walker had pre-humidor Coors Field; Judge is the biggest, strongest position player in baseball history; the other three made Marco Pantani’s pharmaceutical diet look like a garden salad and tap water.

Murakami hasn’t been quite as good since, but the fact that he slugged .700 even once, in the second-best league in the world, is a big deal. In 2025, Murakami was limited to 56 games by a litany of injuries and still managed to go yard 22 times and slug .663.

Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan’s October roundup of free agents from Asia put a 70 or 80 on Murakami’s power grade. That doesn’t come along in the free agent market very often, under any circumstances. And Murakami is literally the youngest player in this free agent class; he’s more than five years younger than Pete Alonso, for instance. And while the White Sox are reportedly penciling Murakami in at first base, he’s at least theoretically capable of playing third.

If you want an example of a player Murakami’s age, with his power and the ability to provide even minimal defensive value, on the free agent market in the past decade… I’m coming up empty after Bryce Harper. And while I don’t think this matters at all to front offices — or at least, it shouldn’t — bringing in a star of Murakami’s stature from NPB is on many levels more fun than signing an equivalent player who was already in the American major leagues. Murakami will be totally new to most White Sox fans, which means it’s easier for fans to let their imaginations run wild than it would be with, say, Ryan O’Hearn. That might not be the healthiest mindset in the long term, but it’s December; there’s no harm in a little optimism.

Insofar as fans are already aware of Murakami’s oeuvre, they’ll probably have come away with overwhelmingly positive impressions. I’ll cop to not being an NPB expert here; I only have vivid memories of watching one Murakami at-bat live. Here’s how that at-bat ended:

Murakami hit the two-run walk-off double that ended Japan’s thrilling semifinal victory over Mexico at the most recent World Baseball Classic. And it wasn’t some blooper off a guy who got called up from beer league because he had a British grandfather, either. Murakami tagged Giovanny Gallegos — a good high-leverage reliever at the time — for a 111-mph missile that hit the wall on the fly.

You excited about this guy, yet? Good. Now get a towel, because I’m about to pour a whole bucket of cold water on that excitement.

Nobody worth listening to thinks Murakami is going to show up in Chicago in March and hit 50 homers or slug .700 right away. The quality of play in Japan is just a little below what it is here, so you’d expect Murakami to take some time to adjust. ZiPS has him pegged to hit .237/.363/.454, with 26 home runs in 515 plate appearances. In fancy math, that comes to a 126 wRC+ and 3.4 WAR.

That looks like a reasonable discount on Murakami’s headline stats from Japan. It would also be a steal at $22 million a year, let alone $17 million.

I’m taking the under on those numbers. Slamming the under. If I were a betting man, I’d be texting Emmanuel Clase’s buddies until my phone melted.

The Western Hemisphere is a net exporter of slugging corner guys. For every Murakami who comes this way, we send half a dozen Quadruple A first basemen to NPB. That means there’s a ready supply of players whom fans remember quite well, to offer a comparison to Murakami:

In the U.S., these guys mostly topped out at entertainingly average. The two hitters on this list who had the best MLB careers were Voit and Reyes. They’ve combined for more 30-homer seasons (two) and home run titles (one) than 2-plus WAR seasons (zero). Voit struck out 31.5% of the time in his last full season in the majors; Reyes struck out 33.2% of the time in his.

Both of them have fared better in NPB, but the swing-and-miss is still there; Reyes had the lowest in-zone contact rate of any qualified hitter in the league in 2025.

In terms of rate stats and production, Murakami makes these guys look like scrubs. He has the highest walk rate, the highest OPS+, and the best slugging percentage by more than 100 points. But he also had an in-zone contact rate of just 73.4%.

In-zone contact rate isn’t the be-all and end-all of a player’s hit tool, but it’s a useful metric for determining how often a batter can put the bat on his pitch. It takes strike zone judgment out of the equation; getting fooled and chasing an 0-2 slider in the dirt doesn’t matter here. When you see the pitch you’re looking for, can you hit it?

A lot of the best hitters in baseball swing and miss at their pitch quite a bit. The scary zone for Z-Contact% starts around 80%. Here’s a partial list of hitters who failed to meet that mark in 2025: Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Ronald Acuña Jr., Kyle Stowers, Randy Arozarena, Nick Kurtz, Giancarlo Stanton, and Rafael Devers.

You can live in the upper 70s and hit 40 home runs a year and sign nine-figure contracts. Plenty of guys do. The guys I just listed, generally, take a ton of walks and also have bonkers raw power. If you miss the middle-middle fastball one out of five times but hit it 115 mph the other four, things tend to even out in the long run.

And Murakami has that kind of plate discipline and raw power. The difference is there’s a huge difference between a high-70s Z-Contact% and a low-70s Z-Contact%. Somewhere in there is a cliff, below which it’s just not possible to be a productive major league hitter over the long run.

One of the best college pitchers of the past 20 years was a guy named Preston Morrison. Over four years at TCU, he posted a 1.85 ERA as a high-workload starter. He had terrific command, changed speeds well, had good deception, pitched well in big games — he went to the College World Series twice — and made at least one All-American team in each of his four years on campus. In almost 500 collegiate innings, he allowed only 11 home runs and 73 walks.

Morrison lasted until the eighth round of the 2015 draft, and signed for just $30,000. Guys he’d run rings around in college were getting 100 times as much money. Appropriately so, it turned out. He carved up Class A ball in his first season and change in the pros, and got his first taste of Double-A in 2017, where he went 1-10 with a 5.51 ERA. He was out of the sport entirely within 18 months of his Double-A debut.

Morrison’s fastball topped out at around 85 mph. Velocity isn’t everything, or even the most important thing, for a pitcher. It’s not enough to have velo, and Morrison was among the best in his class at everything except throwing hard.

But there is a bare minimum requirement for velocity. You can succeed if you throw 90, if everything else is perfect. But you can’t throw 85 — at least not overhand, or without a knuckleball — and get major league hitters out.

In-zone contact rate is to hitters what velocity is to pitchers. And Murakami’s contact rates are the equivalent of an 85-mph fastball. Forget Voit and Franmil; remember Domingo Santana? He was a hot prospect for a while because he could play center field and hit for big power; sure, he’d strike out a lot, but so what?

Well, Santana got to the majors, and it was more corner outfield than center field, and striking out a lot turned into more of a “can’t hit the broad side of a barn” situation. He had one 30-homer season in Milwaukee, and American organizations tired of letting him strike out a third of the time. Even this guy, whose power stroke has apparently disappeared since the last time he played in the U.S., made more contact than Murakami did.

In the past five years, there have been just 10 seasons in which a hitter has posted a Z-Contact% of 75% or less and a wRC+ of 115 or more in the same season of at least 250 plate appearances. (I figure 115 is about the standard of competence for a $17 million-a-year first baseman.) This comes to about 0.6% of total individual hitter seasons.

What does this look like, in practice? Ideally, Devers in 2025. More likely, a good Joey Gallo or Mike Zunino season. And that’s assuming Murakami’s Z-Contact% stays constant, which is a big assumption.

Here’s Eric on Murakami, from his Top 50 Free Agents blurb: “[T]here are scary underlying indicators surrounding Murakami’s contact ability that are something of a red flag when projecting his MLB future. His contact rate tanks against fastballs 93 mph and above (just 63% since 2022) and, more recently, Murakami’s contact rates versus secondary pitches have also plummeted to near 50%.”

If Murakami struggles with high velocity and secondary pitches to that extent, I do not feel confident about his ability to maintain, much less improve, his already-unsurvivable contact numbers. At this point, we’re moving out of the Good Joey Gallo Season Zone and into Bad Christopher Morel Season Territory.

As much as I find it highly likely that Murakami will flop, nothing is certain. A hitter with this level of talent is never more than one swing change away from putting it all together, and it bears repeating that Murakami was hurt for much of last season. If he eats his Wheaties and the White Sox have the right ideas for where to put his hands, Murakami could become a monster.

I’m rooting for this to happen. Having a new 40-homer slugger on any team, under almost any circumstances, would be cool. And these are compelling circumstances: A big-market team that’s been a punchline for the past several years has opened up the checkbook and signed a major free agent. It’d be extremely cool if the White Sox were able to get one over on the league with Murakami.

But the fact that Murakami is signing with a 100-loss team, for about a quarter of what he was supposed to get, tells me the league isn’t holding its collective breath either.

Think about how many teams would kill to throw $20 million a year at even a 50% chance of Murakami translating his skills to the U.S. The Phillies and Orioles just spent way more on Schwarber and Alonso, respectively. The Phillies could still use an upgrade at third base, and are desperate to show Japanese free agents that Philadelphia is a good place to play. The Mets suddenly have a massive void in their lineup after letting Alonso walk and trading Brandon Nimmo.

The Pirates and Reds were in on Schwarber; surely there’d be interested in a hitter from the next shelf down. The stereotype of every Japanese player going to the Dodgers comes from somewhere. What about the Diamondbacks and Giants, two teams in serious need of more power in their pursuit to break through as a genuine threat to the Dodgers? The Mariners just spent way more money on Josh Naylor, rather than get into the Murakami business.

I could go on. None of those teams were willing to shell out $80 million over four years, even? The market was really so soft that the White Sox were able to get Murakami for, like, Rhys Hoskins money?

Look, 29 teams have whiffed on a guy at the same time before. And I’m not going to make fun of the White Sox for signing a big free agent after they’ve had three straight 100-loss seasons and are coming off an $85 million payroll. More than that, while I wouldn’t touch Murakami at what Ben and our readers thought he’d get, $34 million over two years isn’t going to put any franchise out of business — even the White Sox — if it goes bad.

Remember when the Sox offered Manny Machado $175 million over seven years in 2019, and looked silly when he ultimately signed for $300 million? It’s like the market on Murakami actually slid down to the point where a lowball offer was good enough. (OK, I’m going to make fun of the White Sox a little.)

Nevertheless, Murakami is a massively, massively risky player. The red flags on a hitter’s most important skill aren’t even red flags; they’re like atomic priesthood markings. (No highly esteemed contact rate is commemorated here.) A team in Chicago’s position can afford to take big swings, but Murakami is a walking metaphor for what happens when you miss.