{"id":678563,"date":"2026-04-18T18:54:53","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T18:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/678563\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T18:54:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T18:54:53","slug":"white-soxs-munetaka-murakami-surpasses-shohei-ohtani-with-20-game-hr-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/678563\/","title":{"rendered":"White Sox’s Munetaka Murakami surpasses Shohei Ohtani with 20-game HR record"},"content":{"rendered":"

White Sox’s Munetaka Murakami surpasses Shohei Ohtani with 20-game HR record<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While the Chicago White Sox<\/a> might not be the top team in the American League Central, they did make one of the best free-agent signings of the offseason.<\/p>\n

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On a very reasonable $34 million, two-year deal, Munetaka Murakami<\/a> came to the White Sox and has been off to an incredible start to the year.<\/p>\n

As Sarah Langs shared on Twitter\/x<\/a>, Murakami’s hot start to the season, after his sixth home run of the year, surpassed the previous Japanese-born rookie home run record in a player’s first 20 games of their MLB career.<\/p>\n

Munetaka Murakami beats a Shohei Ohtani<\/a> HR record<\/p>\n

“Munetaka Murakami’s six home runs are the most of any Japanese-born player in his first 20 MLB games,” Langs shared. “he surpassed Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, who had five in his first 20 games as a hitter.”<\/p>\n

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This is an incredible feat for Murakami and shows how almost every team overthought him in free agency. The power was always real and worth taking a chance on.<\/p>\n

Even though he might only be hitting .200 on the season, his six homers and 13 RBIs are great marks that any team would love to have at their first base or designated hitter spot.<\/p>\n

More:\u00a0Shohei Ohtani deemed more valuable than Aaron Judge in recent ESPN discussion piece<\/a><\/p>\n

He has an .838 OPS on the season so far, thanks to an impressive 17 walks to bump up his on-base percentage to a solid .361 number. And of course, his .477 slugging percentage is also in good shape.<\/p>\n

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Murakami surpassing Ohtani’s home run record is a very impressive feat. He’s off to a great start to his MLB career, and his record-breaking homer was a moon-shot over the Athletics<\/a>‘ large center-field batters-eye.<\/p>\n

He’s turning into one of the game’s best power hitters. If he can continue to hit as well as he has so far, some more home-run records might be on the horizon.<\/p>\n

More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"White Sox’s Munetaka Murakami surpasses Shohei Ohtani with 20-game HR record originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2379],"tags":[106,5,358,138,49,2561,999,228,101,4,73,1939,468,396,2562],"class_list":{"0":"post-678563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-white-sox","8":"tag-aaron-judge","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-brett-baty","11":"tag-chicago","12":"tag-chicago-white-sox","13":"tag-chicagowhitesox","14":"tag-luis-robert-jr","15":"tag-mark-vientos","16":"tag-mets","17":"tag-mlb","18":"tag-munetaka-murakami","19":"tag-sarah-langs","20":"tag-shohei-ohtani","21":"tag-white-sox","22":"tag-whitesox"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116427232939769438","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}