Especially privately, but often publicly as well, White Sox employees have been upfront about the swing-and-miss risk present in their marquee free-agent signing Munetaka Murakami.
The story of the former NPB triple crown winner and two-time MVP coming to a rebuilding White Sox team is inextricable from his contact profile (28.6 percent strikeout, 63.9 percent contact rates last year) scaring off more moneyed offers than the two years, $34 million that he ultimately accepted. The team's belief in the project is dual-pronged -- that the Sox rebuild can mostly shrug it off if Murakami fails, and that their hitting infrastructure can oversee his transition to MLB pitching.
As the tip of the spear for aiding Murakami's transition, new Sox hitting coach Derek Shomon is forthright that even a successful season for his new first baseman will likely include a sizable acclimation phase to a new league, and that it will probably be shaded closer to the first impression fans get (that, or a hard correction to fast start). Everyone should just prepare for that now.
"I can't overstate or over-stress that it's no different than a Triple-A guy coming to the big leagues. There is this transition period," Shomon said in a phone interview. "No one's really free of it. You're going to get exposed at some point. Pitchers are going to collect enough information about you try to expose those weaknesses. We believe as the hitting group of the White Sox that we have the resources to make that process as seamless as possible. This is a guy that wants to work. He has not shied away from saying that in in his meetings with the White Sox leading up to his signing, and thereafter."
"I do have the confidence to work hard and really face my challenges," Murakami said via interpreter about adjusting to MLB pitching, to Shomon's point. "So I am pretty confident I can succeed in the States."
Murakami is 25 and has 265 career home runs in NPB, so harping on his accomplishments can seem like an easier alternative than mulling over how his in-zone miss issues will fare against MLB four-seamers. But in pointing out that Murakami has previously won the NPB batting title, or that his clutch hits in the 2023 WBC -- including a walk-off double against Mexico -- came when teams were motivated to pursue whiffs against him, showed some latent feel to hit when needed.
"There's different clubs in his bag, he can leave the yard to multiple parts of the field and he can shoot it the other way," Shomon said of watching video of Murakami. "That hit tool is there, just how do we bring that out a little bit more while maintaining the slug?"
Shomon doesn't claim to speak Japanese or anything, but did make a point of building a good relationship with Kenta Maeda's interpreter when he was with the Twins in 2023, and wants to shore up some phrases and means of communicating as much as possible with Murakami. Because inevitably, the 2026 season will feature stretches where Sox coaches will want to reiterate to Murakami what he's good at, in the face of all the new challenges that MLB pitching will offer.
So even if there are some seemingly low-hanging fruit elements in Murakami's swing like loading his hands far away from his body and a big leg kick, both of which could be shaved down to shorten his swing against bigger velocity, all tweaks have to be made with consideration for a player who will be adjusting to more than most. That said, Shohei Ohtani had hit tool concerns in Japan before making swing adjustments to expand his plate coverage actualize his power in MLB. And to draw a parallel to someone who isn't one of the greatest athletes of all time, Shomon has more specific memories of Marlins All-Star Kyle Stowers struggling mightily to cover elevated four-seamers with his loft-oriented left-handed power swing, and using high-speed machine reps to drill him out of it.
"He had egregious swing-and-miss in 2024 on four-seams in the upper half, and he still had a big in-zone miss last year on four-seams," Shomon said. "The difference was he started to touch them, and then he started to not only touch them, he started to slug them. That kind of tells a little bit of a story that you could potentially expect with a really good version of Mune."
The troubling contact rates experienced by Murakami the last few years were exhibited not when he was failing to produce and showing no ability to adjust, but rather as he's been succeeding as much as any NPB hitter in recent memory and had little reason to pivot away from a distinctly power-oriented approach. With the initial impressions of Murakami being someone who is cognizant of the questions around him and willing to make adjustments, Shomon likes to term his contact shortcomings as "areas for improvement" rather than flaws.
And while there's a small subset of hitters who are able to sustain a regular role with a sub-70 percent contact rate -- 10 such qualified hitters in the 2025 season, to be precise -- the raw thump that is necessary to live in such a range means that it usually doubles as some of the preeminent sluggers in the game. Last year, that group included Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Eugenio Suárez, James Wood, and Aaron Judge (lowest contact rate among all qualified hitters at 67.6 percent). Shomon sees Murakami's raw pop as in line with members of that group, so the gains the Sox have to see with his contact rates don't need to be large to deliver big impact.
"When you produce that type of power, and you can create extra bases on a single swing, it does afford you a little bit more of that swing and miss," Shomon said. "When he does make contact, this guy's producing extra-base hits. He's positioning himself closer to that little white thing that looks like a house, and when he touches that, that's a run and our goal is to score as many of those we can per game."
That last line is Shomon getting tongue-in-cheek about Murakami's appeal, but also serves the point of driving home that the simple attraction of adding a famed Japanese home run kings offer to fans crosses the aisle to the coaching staff as well. A high-difficulty, high-reward project that could majorly swing the fate of a rebuilding offense is invigorating in the ways that more predictable methods of shaking up the lineup. As much as Shomon seemed committed to building a scrappy outfit of overachievers upon his hiring, the project of hashing out a development plan for when Murakami returns stateside next month has a unique appeal.
"The excitement, I heard it in your voice and it's the same thing on our end," Shomon said. "This is big. Especially with what Shohei has done and the attachment people have to what is Japanese baseball, now having that in Chicago on the South Side, in a guy that has been successful over there at a very young age, all of those things are super exciting.
"On top of the fact, that we've got the 1-1 pick this year, minor league prospects that are real, a really good offensive second half last season, you start taking all of this stuff -- even the [Sean] Newcomb deal -- there's just a lot of good things going on on the South Side."
