The White Sox’ signing of Munetaka Murakami has proven to be one of the best offseason moves made by any team in the 2025-26 offseason. Chicago landed the 26-year-old slugger on a two-year, $34MM deal after the market didn’t provide the long-term pact he sought. The fit at Guaranteed Rate Field has been a strong one though, and Getz tells Jon Heyman and Joel Sherman of the New York Post that his team is amenable to discussing a longer-term pact to install Murakami as a fixture on the South Side (YouTube link).
“He works his butt off,” Getz said of Murakami. “He’s one of the hardest workers I’ve seen and been around on both sides of the ball. Great teammate — he really is. Guys have just fallen in love with him. I think he’s really happy here, and we’re really happy to have him here. We would love to have him here long-term. It seems that he has interest, and we do as well. We’ve had some conversations, but we’ll just leave it at that.”
Murakami has made the jump to Major League Baseball and been more or less as advertised at the plate: a prodigious power bat who walks at an elite rate but strikes out far too often. There were plenty of concerns about his glovework, as most major league scouts didn’t think he’d be able to play third base — his most frequent position in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. That may be true, but Murakami played plenty of first base in NPB and has been solid there in his first major league season. He’s not a plus defender, but he’s graded out only slightly below average in the estimation of both Defensive Runs Saved (-2) and Outs Above Average (-1). For a player with his offensive profile, that’s a worthwhile trade-off.
Although a hamstring strain cost Murakami a bit more than a month of the season, the next home run he hits will be his 30th in a White Sox uniform. He’s swatted 29 round-trippers in just 429 plate appearances. Granted, Murakami is batting just .219 due to a huge 33.8% strikeout rate, but he also has a hefty .357 on-base percentage due to a mammoth 17.2% walk rate. He’s slugging .503 on the year. By measure of wRC+, his production in the batter’s box has been about 38% better than league average.
The Sox have Murakami signed through next season at a $17MM salary. The looming lockout and threat of missed games in 2027 could conceivably push the White Sox to get something done between now and Dec. 1, as they wouldn’t know precisely when negotiations with Murakami could resume if there’s no deal in place by that point.
Murakami presents an interesting test case for the White Sox as they emerge from their latest rebuild. Chicago, remarkably, has still never given out a contract larger than Andrew Benintendi‘s five-year, $75MM deal. Murakami would surely top that sum, but there aren’t many instructive reference points when looking for contractual comps. A look at MLBTR’s Contract Tracker shows that very few position players sign extensions that would begin with their age-28 season. By that point, most are either already signed long-term under a pre-arb deal or on the cusp of reaching the open market and thus less open to hammering out a long-term deal.
Matt Olson‘s eight-year, $168MM contract in Atlanta began at this juncture, but he was a premium defensive first baseman who’d already won a pair of Gold Gloves and was fresh off a career-best 16.8% strikeout rate. It’s not really fair to ding Murakami for having a lighter MLB track record, but some of the uncertainty surrounding his lack of big league experience and immense strikeout rate will still be priced into a deal.
Broadly speaking, first basemen aren’t typically compensated at top-of-the-market rates in today’s game. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.‘s mammoth $500MM extension with the Blue Jays is an obvious exception to that line of thinking, but it’s also a complete outlier. Guerrero was fresh off a .323/.396/.544 season wherein he smashed 30 homers, made his fourth straight All-Star team, won a Silver Slugger and finished sixth in AL MVP voting — all at just 25 years of age. Another look in our Contract Tracker reveals that in the past decade, the next-largest figure guaranteed to any first baseman … is Olson’s $168MM deal. That includes first basemen of all ages, both extensions and free-agent additions alike.
For that reason, topping Olson would be something of a feat in and of itself. Freddie Freeman (six years, $162MM with deferrals) and Pete Alonso (five years, $155MM) have both approached the same guarantee level of Olson but haven’t surpassed him. Alonso’s $31MM average annual value is the record for non-Guerrero first basemen; Freeman and Paul Goldschmidt signed nine-figure deals paying them $26-27MM annually, though both were better pure hitters with less power than Murakami.
Murakami’s agency at least bears some mention, too. He’s a client of Excel Sports Management, and while the Boras Corporation gets the notoriety and reputation of rarely brokering extensions for its clients, Excel isn’t far behind. In the past six years, the only Excel extensions that bought out would-be free agent seasons have gone to Pablo Lopez, Cal Raleigh and Konnor Griffin (Contract Tracker link). That doesn’t mean no deal can or will be reached, but Excel’s top clients tend to favor free agency; they’ve negotiated nine-figure free agent deals for Kyle Tucker, Zack Greinke, Jason Heyward, Dansby Swanson, Kyle Schwarber, George Springer, Trevor Story and Masahiro Tanaka.
Whatever form it takes — if a deal gets done at all — any Murakami extension will have to somewhat break precedent. For a player whose career arc has minimal precedent, however, perhaps that’s to be expected. That the Sox are engaging in conversations both speaks to the rapid fashion in which Murakami has established himself not only as a bona fide major league slugger but as a fan favorite on Chicago’s south side. The unique nature of his career to date makes an exact prediction difficult to pin down, but it’s a veritable certainty that extending Murakami would require the White Sox to dole out the largest contract in franchise history — likely making Murakami the first $100MM+ player the White Sox have ever had.
