In the arduous six-game marathon that was Munetaka Murakami's homerless streak entering Saturday night, he posted a .360 on-base percentage, even while batting .158 with no extra-base hits.
It was a bit more productive than his eight-game drought from early April (.043/.290/.043), and even zooming out to his slowdown to the entire month of May entering Saturday (.205/.352/.432, 33.3 percent strikeout rate), it looked like the sort of production the White Sox would have happily accepted at the start of the season.
Which would explain why it was so hard to get a member of the Sox uniformed coaching staff to express concern pregame on Saturday afternoon.
"I guess, yeah, and credit to him for setting that expectation," Will Venable said. "I think it was the first few homers to start the year, and then there was a little period where he didn’t and answering the same types of questions, and I think he hit like eight homers in 10 days. So Mune will be just fine, just hasn’t hit a homer in a couple of days."
"When they come in bunches like that and they don't show up for two hours, it's easy to wonder what the hell's going on," said hitting coach Derek Shomon, though I was the one who first made the joke about Murakami's homer drought being two hours long. "But if you look back and see he hit this many in that stretch, and that's abnormal. It's just the law of averages. You get that many in a small period and then you have a stretch when you don't. It looks more like that with the walks and the shoot it, and then he gets back to the slugging. But no concerns on our end."
If you're not familiar yet with the Shomon-ism that "shoot it" is a reference to spraying an outer half pitch for a single to the opposite field, now is a good time to learn. And the Sox hitting coach was particularly proud of Murakami spraying a full-count Edward Cabrera changeup for a single to left to lead off the fourth on Friday night, after letting off an A-swing cut earlier in the at-bat. Those are the sorts of skills are supposed to help Murakami keep his head above water in the lean periods of his power.
But as his first multi-homer MLB performance Saturday night, coupled with Miguel Vargas and Colson Montgomery contributing to a five-dinger White Sox onslaught reminds, the droughts just haven't been long enough to matter anyway.
"He’s a superstar," said Davis Martin. "You play against guys like [Mike] Trout, you play against guys like [Aaron] Judge and Yordan Alvarez, and he’s doing the same things that they are. It’s an incredible thing to watch. From a starting pitcher’s perspective, you have four nights where you’re not throwing, where you have front-row seats and you’re expecting him to do something crazy."
Another wrinkle of Murakami's decidedly miniature home run drought, is that the White Sox went 5-1 and launched 12 home runs over that span. Instead of being the sole attraction on a rebuilding team, Murakami is quite clearly part of a Big Three where Montgomery and Vargas can also take over games on given nights, and it may even be one of the best offensive trios in baseball.
"It’s a rough stretch of a lineup to go through," Venable said. "At the same time, really take pride in the fact that the guys behind them and [Sam] Antonacci in front of them are doing a really good job of having good at-bats, grinding away, running up pitch counts, getting on base for those guys."
It feels absurd and new to say, but the season is over a quarter of the way over and no other team has three separate hitters with 11 home runs...
- Murakami, 17
- Montgomery, 13
- Vargas, 11
...or perhaps more impactfully, the Sox are one of just two teams with three separate hitters running a wRC+ of 135 or higher:
- Murakami, 157
- Vargas, 145
- Montgomery, 138
That the Marlins are the other reflects the strangeness of the 2026 season up to this point, and Cody Bellinger's 0-for-5 Saturday is all that kept the Yankees from being the third such team. But to sum it up in other words, specifically Montgomery's words:
"Me, Mune and Vargas, I think we are all really good at it," Montgomery said. "Getting on base and driving guys in, driving in runs."
"They are really good teammates and the centerpiece of the team," Murakami said via interpreter. "It’s just not one person. It’s the full lineup, one through nine, feeding off each other. It’s a great confidence builder, seeing other players get good results. I just want to be that contributor and contribute to the lineup and contribute to the team’s wins."
The White Sox's hitting identity, at least in how it's described at their spring training complex, sets their goal at launch angles between 5 and 30 degrees for best outcomes. In that sense, Murakami (37, 36) and Montgomery (33) strayed from the light on Saturday, while Vargas only barely stayed in bounds (28).
But this is a team where even contact-oriented leadoff man Sam Antonacci is adding bat speed, and the similarly-oriented Chase Meidroth has traded some measure of contact for impact. If they're not quite espousing "ball go far, team go far," they're certainly getting hitters -- Vargas being a chief example -- who wouldn't normally describe themselves as sluggers to embrace opportunities to elevate and drive the baseball for maximum impact.
"For sure, for sure," Vargas said. "I want to be aggressive in the zone and that was something I worked on in the offseason. I feel my strike zone is pretty decent and I'm just now letting my swing go for a little bit and it feels good for now."
"The messaging from the hitting guys has been to take your best bat speed to good pitches," Venable said. "Put yourself in a position to see the ball, be on time and get good swings off. Those guys have responded to that messaging and that training and obviously those guys are in the box doing it, but a lot of credit to Sho and Joel [McKeithan] and Tony [Medina] and the hitting staff for doing a really good job of getting those guys on track."
For now, it's clicking for an offense that is averaging over 5.2 runs per game in the month of May, with 26 home runs in 14 games. As much as the Sox offense wants to be versatile and have several ways of beating opponents, the temperatures are rising, and Rate Field is looking like a pretty inviting place to drive the ball in the air right now.
"We know balls hit hard in play usually hit better results," said Shomon, who was talking about Meidroth specifically, but preaching principles that apply writ large. "Sacrificing maybe some contact because he is hitting balls harder, looking to split a gap, it's a fair trade off."
Plus, as Saturday reiterated, it turns out Murakami is still going pretty well too, even if he slowed up for just a moment.
"I told you guys he’s just fine," Venable said postgame.
