This is one of those stories that has been percolating for literal years now, and no one is surprised by the news. But now we know it’s definitely happening.
Per Mark Feinsand, Japanese slugger Munetaka Murakami will be posted sometime this offseason by the Yakult Swallows in Nippon Professional Baseball. Typically, these postings happen before the Winter Meetings in December, allowing ample time for teams to negotiate with the player and make budget allocations.
Murakami, long a star lefty slugger in Japan, figures to get a whole lot of attention when the posting arrives.
Talk about a guy who is tough to project in MLB. On the one hand, Munetaka Murakami will play next season at age 26, and he already has multiple monster seasons in the NPB. On the other hand, his best seasons came a few years ago. On the one hand, he hit .286/.392/.659 with 24 homers in just 69 games this year. On the other hand, he played only 69 games this year because of various injury issues. On the one hand, he can play both corner infield spots. On the other hand, it’s not known just how well he’d play those positions in MLB or as he ages.
Then there are the big questions, mostly tied to Murakami’s fluctuating power and his sizable strikeout rate, which has at times approached 30% (a whopping figure for the NPB). Would MLB pitchers simply be too much for him to actually use his power in-game? If the strikeout rate climbed further and the power dipped, would he even be a plus bat in MLB? Or could an MLB org help him adjust to the subtle differences between the leagues? Might he even take a further step forward, given his relative youth?
You can expect all the usual suspects to be involved in this process, though the Cubs have not yet been name-checked. When it comes to Japanese stars, I would actually now tend to include them in that “usual suspects” group, given the pipeline they’re pretty clearly trying to build out.
Is Murakami a fit, though? Well, I think there’s an argument that, given his age, if you believe in the bat, you make the rest work. Maybe the Cubs believe he can play third base well enough, and that means, if Alex Bregman is a reasonable target, then so too should be Murakami. Maybe the Cubs have concerns about the offense after 2026 in general, and simply want to make sure they have more impactful bats under long-term control.
I don’t think a pursuit here for the Cubs is an obvious thing, in the way it has been more easily predicted in other cases. I suspect the answer is tied to the organization’s internal, private evaluation of Murakami, and how they believe he translates to MLB. I’m not sure that is known yet, and I couldn’t really speculate. If we start to see some Cubs-related rumors pick up as Murakami’s posting window approaches, though, you can fairly guess that the Cubs maybe are believers in the bat.
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