Munetaka Murakami Of The Chicago White Sox

Former Tokyo Yakult Swallow Munetaka Murakami signed a two year, $34 million deal with the Chicago White Sox last weekend.  Murakami is one of at least five Japanese players looking to join MLB teams this winter and was the first to sign with a team.  

Murakami was the first round pick of the Swallows in the 2017 draft out of Kyushu Gakuin High School in Kumamoto, but that's a bit of an oversimplification - he wasn't the Swallows first choice for their first pick.  Yakult was one of seven teams who selected Kotaro Kiyomiya in the first round with the Fighters ultimately winning the lottery for his rights.  In the second draft of the first round, they, along with the Giants and Eagles picked Murakami and the Swallows won his lottery.  (This is actually the second time I can think of off hand where the Swallows lost out on their first pick to the Fighters and ended up with a MUCH better player as a result.)

Murakami spent most of his first season on the farm, only getting into six games at the ichi-gun level in September.  He made the most of his time in the minors, though, hitting 17 home runs in 98 games and winning the Eastern League MVP award.  The Swallows opened the 2019 season with Murakami playing third and the rest is pretty much history.  

I'm not going to go through his career year by year but suffice it to say, he's done very well for himself.  He's hit 246 home runs over eight seasons which not only includes his 2018 season in which he only hit one home run at the top level (in his first at bat!) and his injury shortened 2024 season in which he hit 22 home runs in only 56 games.  He was Rookie of the Year in 2019 and won the Central League MVP in both 2021 and 2022.  2022, of course, was his best overall season when he not only won the Triple Crown (first NPB player to do so since Nobuhiko Matsunaka in 2004 and first Central Leaguer to do it since Randy Bass in 1986) but he hit 56 home runs, the second highest total in NPB history.  He's won four Best 9 awards (2020-22, 2024) and made the All Star team four times (2019, 2021-22, 2024) which seems low but keep in mind that there was no All Star game in the COVID-shortened 2020 season.

There are two things that I already know that I'm going to get tired of explaining.  The first is that, despite Jeff Passan of ESPN constantly reporting it, Murakami is NOT "single-season home run champion in Japan".  To be honest, he's not even the "single-season home run champion" of the Swallows.  Wladimir Balentien hit 60 home runs in 2013 and, despite the likes of Joe Posnanski attempting to claim there's some "juiced ball controversy" tainting Balentien's home run record, no one's really disputing it.  Jim Allen has more to say about this, but Murakami's 56 home runs in 2022 is the most by a "Japanese-born" player in NPB history, which is basically a made-up record for the purposes of sensationalism.

The other thing is something I haven't had to explain yet but I'm betting I will have to at some point.  For the purposes of his baseball cards, Murakami was a "rookie" in 2018.  However, from the point of view of NPB, he was still a rookie in 2019 - hence him winning the "Rookie Of The Year" award.  All his cards from 2018 are marked as "rookie" cards and none of his 2019 cards are but I'm sure that won't stop someone on Ebay or Reddit from claiming his 2019 cards are his "true rookie cards".

Speaking of his cards, let's talk about them.  TCDB lists 62 cards for him from 2018 but once you eliminate the parallel, insert, memorabilia and autographed cards, his number of base set rookie cards is more like eleven.  His first card is #107 in the 2018 BBM Rookie Edition set and he also appears in BBM's Icons - Fanfare, 1st Version, Swallows and Rookie Edition Premium sets.  He also appears in Calbee's Series One "Dora-Ichi" subset and Epoch's NPB, Swallows Rookies & Stars and Swallows Stars & Legend sets.   He actually has three separate cards in the Swallows Rookies & Stars set but as far as I can tell, none of them are any rarer than any others.  One shows him fielding, one shows him batting and the other shows him running the bases.  Here are all the 2018 cards I have for him - I'm missing the Rookie Edition Premium and Swallows Stars & Legend cards along with one of the Swallows Rookies & Stars cards.  I did include an insert card of his from the BBM Swallows set that I had:

2018 BBM Rookie Edition #107

2018 BBM Icons - Fanfare #35

2018 BBM 1st Version #317

2018 BBM Swallows #S54

2018 BBM Swallows #HT3

2018 Calbee Series One #D-12

2018 Epoch NPB #425

2018 Epoch Swallows Rookies & Stars #58a

2018 Epoch Swallows Rookies & Stars #58c

I'm going to finish this post off with a number of other cards of him - two from each year from 2019 to 2024 (when I stopped getting new cards).  I've got a number of Epoch One cards for him as well as even more cards of him with Samurai Japan, so I've decided to show those in a later post (that I probably won't get to until January).

2019 BBM 2nd Version #CS59

2019 Calbee Series Three #S-64

2020 Calbee Series One #TR-2

2020 BBM Swallows #S55

2021 BBM 1st Version #313

2021 Epoch NPB #419

2022 Topps NPB #185

2022 BBM Fusion #TH03

2023 Calbee Series One #T-09

2023 Epoch NPB #241

2024 Calbee Series One "Team Home Run Kings" #HR-05 

2024 Topps NPB #49