Teruaki Sato mashes. But will he keep mashing in the Major Leagues?
The best hitter in Japan is coming here next season. Sato is the reigning Nippon Professional Baseball MVP, and he won a hitting Triple Crown this season. Now the 27-year-old lefty slugger has been posted by his NPB club, the Hanshin Tigers, and has his sights set on the big leagues.
So what can we expect from Sato in MLB? Will we get the second coming of Munetaka Murakami? Murakami was the last hitter to win an NPB Triple Crown before Sato, and he arrived in the Majors with a bang, mashing 35 homers for the White Sox -- the most by a Japanese hitter in his big league debut.
Sato just might have that kind of power in his bat, too. Let's dive into some numbers.
What do the projections say about Sato?
The easiest way to get some idea of what Sato might do in MLB in 2027: Look at the projections!
We're still very early here, but check out how FanGraphs' Depth Charts projects Sato for 2027:
- .247 AVG/.314 OBP/.468 SLG
- 31 HRs, 89 RBIs
- 112 wRC+ (aka, 12% better than an average hitter)
- 2.7 Wins Above Replacement
That's … pretty darn good! That's a productive big league power hitter. Sato is one of 23 hitters currently projected for 30-plus homers next season. His projections are pretty much in line with Murakami's projections entering the 2026 season, too -- Mune was projected for 30 home runs and a 118 wRC+. He beat those numbers, by the way.
And that type of season would make sense for Sato after what he has done in NPB. In 2025, he batted .277 with 40 home runs, 102 RBIs and a .924 OPS. In '26, he batted .306 with 39 home runs, 106 RBIs and a .991 OPS.
What about the underlying hitting data?
We want to know more about how Sato hits, though. NPB has tracking data just like Statcast for MLB. This is what it tells us about Sato: He swings a fast bat, he hits the ball hard and he hits it in the air.
All those numbers look very strong. Start with the bat speed. Sato averages close to 75 mph on his swings, which would rank inside the top 50 MLB hitters in 2026. Sato's bat speed in NPB was nearly identical to Murakami's in MLB, 74.7 mph.
The hard-hit numbers are even better. Sato's exit velocity was the equivalent of a top-10 MLB hitter, right in line with Shohei Ohtani's mark for 2026. His max exit velo, over 117 mph, is a level only a handful of big league hitters reach in a season.
Sato's hard-hit rate would be just outside the top five, with mashers like Jac Caglianone. His barrel rate (that's basically how often he hits the ball really hard and in the air) would be right up there at the top of the leaderboard with James Wood and Nick Kurtz, who were behind only -- guess who? -- Murakami.
We can't predict exactly how all those hard contact numbers will translate from MLB to NPB, but we do know they give Sato a high ceiling as a power hitter. They're what you want -- especially the barrel rate, which is a very important metric.
Does that match what we saw at the World Baseball Classic?
Pretty much, yeah. Sato played for Team Japan at the 2026 WBC, and while those 10 at-bats don't exactly give us a big sample to work with, we did get a tiny bit of Statcast data on Sato.
In those handful of games, we saw a fast bat from Sato, and when he hit the ball, he hit it hard. Half of his batted balls at the WBC were hard contact -- 95-plus mph off the bat -- including a 109 mph double lefty-lefty off Ranger Suarez.
Based on how he followed up that WBC performance in the 2026 NPB season, we'd put stock in Sato continuing to rip the ball in MLB next year.
How does Sato compare to Murakami?
Sato's been drawing comparisons to Murakami, and the parallels between them are obvious -- there's the NPB Triple Crown connection, and both are hard-hitting lefties with prodigious home run power.
But Sato and Murakami also have different hitting approaches. Here are a few traits that stand out.
Murakami is a very patient, selective hitter who uses his plate discipline to offset his high swing-and-miss numbers. He draws tons of walks, and only when he gets his pitch does he let it rip. The home runs that ensue, coupled with the walks, add much more value than his strikeouts take away. That's what we saw in his rookie season in Chicago.
Sato is kind of the opposite. He's very aggressive. He swings at well over half the pitches he sees, including 53% this past season.
As Japanese baseball expert Yuri Karasawa points out, Sato swings more than basically any NPB hitter of note over the past five years, including the big names that have jumped to MLB.
That aggressive hacking from Sato is a little bit of a double-edged sword. He doesn't strike out as much as Murakami; he also doesn't draw as many walks. He makes more contact than Murakami, especially against breaking and offspeed pitches and against pitches in the strike zone -- Sato both swings and makes contact against strikes about 80% of the time. That leads to lots of extra-base hits when you swing and hit as hard as Sato does. But he also runs a very high chase rate, swinging at a third or more of the pitches he sees that are out of the strike zone. That's playing with fire against the nasty MLB pitchers he'll face.
Like Murakami with his high-walk, high-home run, high-strikeout tradeoff, Sato's tradeoff of a lot of "A" swings in the strike zone for some bad swings outside it has been worth it so far. In that respect, the two NPB stars are also alike. Their different hitting styles both get the job done. Hopefully, that stays true for Sato in MLB, too.