One of the biggest international free agents on the market this offseason has signed … for a suspiciously small number. The White Sox landed Japanese slugger Munetaka Murakami Sunday, for a deal that will pay him just $34 million over the next two seasons.
Murakami has a proven track record of elite production in the second best baseball league in the world and is just 26 years old, so the assumption among most was that he would at least challenge Masataka Yoshida‘s record $90 million contract for a position player from Nippon Professional Baseball. Instead, he wound up signing a deal that will pay him $6 million less than what an older, injury-plagued Jorge Polanco just signed for.
Given that we don’t have access to the same type of robust, granular data from NPB as we do for MLB players in the public sphere, the contract Murakami just signed seems telling. We’re talking about a 26-year-old with legit 70-grade power – he hit 56 homers in a season once and had a max exit velocity of 116.5 mph last season – the fact that Murakami ended up settling for a two-year deal worth less annual than what Ha-seong Kim and Polanco just got tells us that there are grave concerns about his ability to translate his skills to the majors.
And I’m mostly inclined to just leave it at that. MLB teams aren’t infallible, and when it comes to a player making the transition from NPB to the majors, there’s an inherent uncertainty that makes it harder to say with confidence whether this will end up being a good deal or not. But there are no shortage of teams with the need for a potential 30-plus power hitter in the middle of the lineup, and the fact that Murakami ended up with a similar contract to the ones Jurickson Profar and Tyler O’Neill signed last season (while being significantly older and with pretty mediocre MLB track records) stands out as a pretty big red flag, one Fantasy player shouldn’t just ignore.
I’m not going to totally bury him in my rankings but given that the White Sox (and the other 29 teams, frankly) know a whole lot more about Murakami than we do, I am very much inclined to view him with a skeptical eye. We’ll get to the scouting report for Murakami shortly, but the long and short of it is there are significant contact questions with his swing that make his likelihood of living up to the loftiest expectations pretty unlikely. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as a prospect if he signed for big money, but with the details in now, it seems like MLB teams just don’t have a lot of faith in his swing. If MLB teams are telling us they don’t have much more faith in him than they do in Polanco, we should probably listen.
So, for Fantasy, I’m not going to rank Murakami as someone you need to draft for your starting lineup, even if he ends up listed as a 3B, a shallow position where power is at a premium. Projecting him as a 3B-eligible player – he may just end up playing 1B or even DH – I’m ranking him 14th at the position, in between two players with some similar skills and deficits in Royce Lewis and Lenyn Sosa. He could hit 30 homers with a manageable batting average, but Murakami’s likeliest outcomes in your mental model should probably have shifted to the bad side of the scale with this contract.
Here’s what you need to know about Murakami:
Let’s start with the good*
*which is easier to make sense of with Murakami’s profile
The first thing to understand about Murakami is the context of the league he’s playing in. Last season, the worst qualifying hitter in MLB was Ke’Bryan Hayes, who put together a .235/.290/.306 triple-slash line between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. The average hitter in the Central League of NPB put together a .242/.302/.350 slash line. Among six teams in the Central League, only five even got to 100 home runs.
By comparison, Murakami hit 22 homers in just 56 games, putting up a .286/.392/.659 slash line despite playing through injuries. That was good for a 211 wRC+; over the past decade in MLB, Aaron Judge (2024, 2022, and 2025) and Juan Soto (2020) are the only qualifiers to put up a wRC+ of at least 200 in a season. Murakami has actually managed that feat twice, when he posted a 225 wRC+ in his record-breaking 2022 season.
There have been some ups and downs, but Murakami has probably been the best hitter in Japan over the past half-decade on the strength of world-class power. He had a max exit velocity of 116.5 mph last season and by all accounts was putting up average and 90th percentile exit velocities in the same range as some of the best power hitters in MLB.
If Murakami isn’t an 80-grade power hitter, it’s probably not much worse than 70-grade, and he knows how to put it into play in games. 30 homers isn’t the ceiling here. If he ends up being an impact player in MLB, it’ll almost certainly because he is a well above average power hitter.
So, what’s wrong with Murakami?
Well, it should come as no surprise if you are moderately aware of how these things typically work: He strikes out too much. But in Murakami’s case, this goes beyond merely just striking out too much. His strikeout rate has settled in around 29% over the past couple of seasons, and he simply swings and misses too often. Here’s what I wrote in an earlier breakdown of Murakami this offseason in the Fantasy Baseball Today Newsletter:
“Per MLB.com, Murakami has had a whiff rate around 36% over the past two seasons, with his strikeout rate jumping to 29% in that stretch. That’s a frightening statistic, and his in-zone contact rate is even more troubling, as he was at just 72.6% in 2025, down from 77.1% in 2022 and well below the MLB average of 82.5%. And he was doing that against less-than-MLB-level competition, meaning we might project even more regression there. And Murakami has also notably struggled against high-velocity fastballs, something he’ll see a lot more of in the majors than he has in NPB so far.”
How bad is that 72.6% mark? Only Rafael Devers posted a worse mark in 2026 among MLB hitters at 71.4%. That’s not a bad comp for Murakami – he shares Devers’ elite quality of contact skills and his inability to really handle third base, though he’s probably a smidge more selective than Devers – but a comp of one doesn’t give you a lot to fall back on. Devers is an outlier even among whiff-prone sluggers, and expecting any hitter to be Rafael Devers is probably asking too much.
But it isn’t impossible, and Murakami does have the power to make it all work. He’ll just constantly be dancing on a knife’s edge. Joey Gallo had a similar profile and made it work for a few years, but the ugly years were truly horrendous, and he fell off quickly. Murakami will need to either improve his contact rates to more tolerable levels or be an absolute outlier when it comes to the damage he does when he makes contact.
Neither is out of the realm of possibility. He was a better contact hitter earlier in his career, and the fact that NPB and MLB literally use different balls – the NPB ball is a little bit smaller and tackier, leading to more movement – could mean that his specific shortcomings are magnified in Japan in a way that might be less true in MLB. Plus, Shohei Ohtani had some similar issues with in-zone contact when he came over, and obviously that hasn’t held him back.
Murakami has some legitimate MLB-caliber skills, and the upside here is enough that he should still be drafted in all Fantasy leagues in 2026. But there’s no question that this contract gives his detractors ammo and should be a mark against him. Draft him as a cheap source of power in the later rounds and hope he manages to avoid the worst-case scenarios. If he’s off the board around 200, you’ve probably managed the risk well enough that he’s worth having around, even if the likeliest outcome might have shifted more toward the Matt Wallner edge of the spectrum.
