Munetaka Murakami hit his 20th home run of the season Wednesday, and the Chicago White Sox kept rolling with a 15-2 win over the Minnesota Twins. The blast pushed Murakami into a place few major leaguers have ever reached so quickly: through 55 career games, only Cody Bellinger and Wally Berger have hit more home runs.
That is why Murakami is suddenly one of the most searched names in baseball, and why the White Sox look less like a team in a rebuild than a club trying to hold onto October. He is tied with Yordan Alvarez for the most home runs in the American League, tied for second in the league with 40 RBI, and carrying a.240/.375/.561 line with an AL-best 42 runs scored. For a Chicago team that is 28-27, sitting in second place in the AL Central behind Minnesota and holding one of the three American League wild-card spots, that kind of power has changed the shape of the season.
Murakami did not arrive in Chicago as a mystery. The White Sox signed him to a two-year, $34 million deal this offseason after he spent 2021 and 2022 as a back-to-back MVP in Nippon Professional Baseball. In 2022, he won the Triple Crown with a.318 average, 56 homers and 134 RBI, then broke Sadaharu Oh's single-season NPB record for a Japanese-born player. The White Sox bet on that track record even after three straight seasons of more than 100 losses, and the early return has been as loud as any swing in the league.
Still, the part of the story that matters most is the one that has not been answered yet. Murakami’s pace is historic now, but baseball does not hand out full-season awards in May. If he keeps lifting Chicago the way he has over the first month and a half of his career, the White Sox will keep pressing against the edge of the playoff field. If he does not, this will read like the night a prodigy flashed everything he brought from Japan and reminded the league how quickly a bargain can turn into a centerpiece.
