Twenty home runs. First in the American League. Second in all of baseball, one behind Kyle Schwarber. On pace for 55 by October. And if you asked a random sports fan to name the most compelling offensive story in the sport right now, you’d get Shohei Ohtani, you’d get Aaron Judge, you’d get a blank stare. Not Murakami.
This is a crime.
The guy hit 56 home runs in Japan at age 22 — that broke Sadaharu Oh’s single-season NPB record for Japanese-born players, by the way — and came to Chicago on a $34 million deal that every team in baseball passed on because they were scared of his strikeout rate. He’s struck out 76 times in 53 games. He’s also walked 41 times and is slugging .561 with a .936 OPS. The scouts who said he couldn’t handle MLB velocity are currently explaining themselves to nobody, because nobody is asking, because nobody is watching.
MLB.com tracked it when it happened: on May 27, Murakami became the first player in the AL to reach 20 home runs this season. The White Sox account posted it. Beat writers noted it. The national desk was busy talking about the NBA playoffs.
The Ohtani comparisons write themselves but the numbers are actually worse for Ohtani. He hit 3 HRs in his first 8 games in 2018; Murakami hit 4. Ohtani finished that debut year with 22 total. Murakami has 20 before June. Before June. He matched Pete Alonso and Mark McGwire’s pre-June rookie home run record and then kept going. At 98+ mph, he’s the only player in baseball with multiple home runs off elite heat — his slugging against fastballs is .660 against a league average of .432. An opposing pitcher, Arizona’s Ryan Thompson, said after Murakami went deep on him that he “threw him one pitch and he hit it 700 feet.” That’s not a literal measurement. That’s a man venting into the void.
The White Sox are 27-26 and in second place in the AL Central. That sentence also probably doesn’t mean anything to you, because last year they lost 121 games — the all-time MLB record for losses in a single season — and were the punchline of the sport. They are no longer the punchline. Murakami is the reason. His nickname in Japan was “Murakami-sama” — “Murakami the God” — and it was the country’s word of the year in 2022. South Side fans are starting to learn why.
The Athletic has covered the broader market misjudgment of NPB imports, but even that framing treats this as a historical curiosity rather than an active, ongoing embarrassment for the national media apparatus. He is the AL home run leader right now. Today. On a team playing .500 ball in a market that isn’t New York or Los Angeles, so apparently it doesn’t count.
The White Sox Twitter is buzzing every night he hits one out. The reaction every time:
your @MLB home run leader, Munetaka Murakami: https://t.co/foDmf0qmBi pic.twitter.com/aFKGIPpQF0
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) April 28, 2026
And then nothing. Radio silence nationally until the next milestone forces acknowledgment.
Chris Getz paid $34 million for a player with 246 career NPB home runs because he believed the scouting consensus was wrong. At 20 HRs in late May, on pace to challenge Pete Alonso’s all-time MLB rookie record of 53, Murakami is making Getz look like the smartest man in the room. A room that, it turns out, was mostly empty.
The most interesting offensive player in baseball plays at Rate Field. You should probably start paying attention before someone in New York hits 20 and the whole machine turns on.
