The countdown for Munetaka Murakami's move to the Majors is officially underway.
All 30 Major League clubs will be informed on Friday that Murakami has been posted by the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, with his official negotiating window set to open on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. ET.
Murakami will have until 5 p.m. ET on Dec. 22 to agree to a deal with a big league team. If he is still unsigned at that point, his posting window will expire and he will return to the Swallows.
Murakami’s move to the Majors has been in the works for months. Last December, it was reported that the 2025 season would be his last in Nippon Professional Baseball, while Yakult team president and acting owner Tetsuya Hayashida told multiple Japanese media outlets in June that the club was “willing” to post the two-time Central League Most Valuable Player and four-time All-Star.
Murakami has played the bulk of his games at third base, though some believe he may be better suited as a first baseman in the Majors. The 6-foot-2, 213-lb. slugger hit 246 home runs in 892 games, including a 56-homer campaign in 2022 that broke Sadaharu Oh’s 58-year-old record for home runs in a single season by a Japanese-born player.
Murakami also won the Triple Crown that year at the age of 22, becoming the youngest player in league history to accomplish that feat.
“He has legit power,” said one scout who has watched Murakami multiple times. “It should translate to the Majors.”
The Yankees, Mets, Mariners, Phillies, Giants and Red Sox are among the clubs expected to have interest in Murakami, one of two Japanese sluggers expected to make the move to the Majors this winter. Kazuma Okamoto of the Yomiuri Giants, a six-time All-Star and three-time home run champion in Japan, is also likely to be posted.
Injuries limited Murakami to only 56 games in 2025, though he belted 22 home runs with 47 RBIs and a 1.043 OPS in those contests.
Knowing the likelihood that Pete Alonso would opt out of his contract (as he did), Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns went to Japan in August to see Murakami, who hit a walk-off home run with Stearns in attendance. The Mariners are facing the loss of both first baseman Josh Naylor and third baseman Eugenio Suárez to free agency, making them a logical suitor for Murakami.
Murakami offers a number of possibilities for the Phillies, who may lose Kyle Schwarber and his 56 homers to free agency. Philadelphia could move Bryce Harper back to the outfield to open first base, or the Phillies could trade third baseman Alec Bohm, who is entering his final year prior to free agency. The Red Sox could use Murakami at first base, or if Alex Bregman signs elsewhere, they would have a vacancy at third base.
San Francisco, which has Matt Chapman at third base and Rafael Devers at DH, could use Murakami at first base, though Bryce Eldridge -- San Francisco’s No. 1 prospect and No. 12 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 -- might be ready to assume duties at first base, making the Giants less of a fit than some other clubs.
If there’s a potential red flag for Major League teams, it’s Murakami’s strikeout rate, which has risen significantly over the past three seasons. He whiffed in more than 30 percent of his at-bats during his first two seasons, but lowered that rate to between 20.9 and 22.3 percent from 2020 through 2022. The past three seasons, that rate has increased again to between 28.1 and 29.5 percent, including a 180-strikeout season in 610 plate appearances in 2024.
Also of concern is Murakami’s walk rate, which has dipped from a career-high 19.3 percent in his monster 2022 season to 14.3 percent this past year. Murakami owns a .394 career on-base percentage, though it has decreased into the .370s in each of the past three seasons after hovering between .408 and .458 from 2020 through 2022.
“The strikeout and walk numbers may scare some teams away,” an AL executive said last month. “He has big power, but there appear to be a lot of holes in that swing.”
Murakami turned 25 in February, so he won’t be limited to international bonus pool money the way Roki Sasaki was last offseason. Players who are at least 25 and have played as a professional in a foreign league recognized by Major League Baseball for a minimum of six seasons are exempt from those restrictions. NPB players are not eligible for unrestricted free agency until they have played nine seasons, so Murakami must be posted by Yakult if he wants to make the move to MLB.
It will be interesting to see what type of contract Murakami will command, as the biggest deals signed by NPB players coming to the Majors have mostly gone to pitchers such as Yoshinobu Yamamoto (12 years, $325 million before the 2024 season), Masahiro Tanaka (seven years, $155 million in 2014) and Kodai Senga (five years, $75 million before the 2023 season).
The top contracts for Japanese position players have gone to Masataka Yoshida (five years, $90 million before the 2023 season) and Seiya Suzuki (five years, $85 million in 2022), while Jung Hoo Lee, who starred in South Korea’s KBO League for seven years, received a six-year, $113 million deal from the Giants prior to the 2024 season. None of those players possessed Murakami’s power, which hasn’t been seen by a player making the jump from NPB to MLB since Hideki Matsui more than two decades ago.
There will be some big names on the corner-infield/DH market this winter -- Schwarber, Bregman, Alonso, Suárez and Naylor are all free agents -- so while Murakami is something of an unknown quantity, he could become an alternative for clubs that find the asking price on those established MLB players too high.