Twelve home runs. Twenty-nine games. More long balls than Aaron Judge. More than Yordan Alvarez. On the Chicago White Sox.
The guy leading Major League Baseball in home runs right now plays for a team that was supposed to be assembling draft picks and eating its vegetables until 2028.
Munetaka Murakami signed with the Sox on December 21st for two years and $34 million — a deal so quiet it barely registered outside of NPB circles. The posting fee alone was $6.575 million. Nobody was crashing Twitter to debate this one. He wasn’t Ohtani. He wasn’t Ichiro. He was a 26-year-old from Japan who most American fans had never watched swing a bat.
Those fans missed the context: in 2022, Murakami hit 56 home runs in the NPB, breaking a record that Sadaharu Oh had held for 58 years. He won the Triple Crown. His career slash with the Yakult Swallows was .270/.394/.557 over 892 games. The man could flat-out rake, and the White Sox got him for a price that looks like a typo now.
He homered in each of his first three career MLB games. He homered in five straight games at one point, tying a White Sox franchise record. His first 12 extra-base hits were all home runs — the longest such streak to open a career since 1900. He’s posting a .965 OPS through 29 games, an OPS+ of 165.
The White Sox are 12-17. For a rebuild team in April, that’s not embarrassing. It’s actually kind of remarkable.
your @MLB home run leader, Munetaka Murakami: https://t.co/foDmf0qmBi pic.twitter.com/aFKGIPpQF0
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) April 28, 2026
Manager Will Venable keeps saying Murakami has exceeded every expectation they had. That understates it. Murakami isn’t just exceeding expectations on a rebuilding club — he’s the first Japanese-born player to lead MLB in home runs at any point in a season. Ever. In the history of the sport.
And outside of Chicago, almost nobody is talking about it.
Part of that is the White Sox tax — the national media checked out on this franchise two years ago and hasn’t looked back. Part of it is that Murakami was playing in Japan until four months ago, so there’s no long highlight reel burned into the American sports fan’s brain. He didn’t have a documentary. He didn’t have a bidding war. He had a quiet December signing and a spring training nobody watched.
Remember when we spent half of April asking whether the White Sox actually won the Crochet trade? The answer to that keeps getting more interesting. Turns out the rebuild has a centerpiece nobody planned for.
The Sox found the man who broke Sadaharu Oh’s NPB single-season record, signed him for what amounts to couch cushion money by MLB standards, and he’s currently ahead of every slugger in the game. That’s not a feel-good story. That’s front office work that deserves actual credit.
Somebody forgot to tell Murakami this was supposed to take years.