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The White Sox signed Nippon Professional Baseball’s Munetaka Murakami over the weekend, after he was posted by the Yakult Swallows last month. The deal is for two years and $34 million, which might not sound like all that much when you think of all the headlines about his prodigious power and his being just 25 years old, but there are genuine concerns with his ability to succeed in MLB, concerns which are obviously shared widely given he ended up signing with the White Sox for this specific contract.
Now, it’s easy to laugh at the series of events that led to the White Sox getting a guy for whom the coverage the last month was a lot of, “well I don’t know about that,” given his documented struggles with higher velocities and MLB having a higher average velocity than NPB — I mean, I did. It is worth pointing out, however, that this is the kind of move the White Sox should be making. As I also posted to Bluesky, no one signs with the White Sox because they want to: they lost a record 120 games in 2024, and were “better” in 2025 in the sense that the lost 102 games, the third season in a row with at least 100 losses for the team. Their owner is a notorious cheapskate who doesn’t invest in the minors or the majors or even the team plane, and there is basically no reason to trust either their talent evaluation or their player development — maybe someone could fix Murakami to make him more successful against higher velocity, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it being the White Sox.
Murakami, though, has known issues. He’s the kind of free agent the White Sox could pounce on since other organizations — more successful organizations — don’t want to take the risk on him not panning out. That he was available to them at all is something of a problem for both parties, but there is also the possibility they make it work. On this deal, at these terms, in their situation? This was absolutely the kind of move the White Sox should make. It has risks, but there is upside, and they aren’t about to convince Kyle Tucker to sign for them or anything — nor would they be willing to pay for him even if he was able to convinced — so it’s a positive that they took this leap.
Now, 1,200 plate appearances on, maybe they flushed $34 million down the drain. That wouldn’t be anything new for the White Sox, though. At least here there is some upside attached, instead of the usual refrains of “him?” after they do actually spend a little dough on a player. You have to at least try to show you’re changing the culture a bit if you want to have opportunities beyond goods the majority of the league is concerned are damaged, and taking this risk moves that needle a little.
Last week, the WNBA Player’s Association authorized its negotiators to call for a strike if they deemed it necessary during bargaining with the WNBA. As has been covered in this space lately, the league is refusing to admit that the grift is over, and that it’s time for them to present an actual revenue-sharing solution in which the players get something at least approximating a fair share, instead of the current situation which sees over 90 percent of revenues go in the league’s pockets, while players make so little compared to other major sports leagues that they feel the need to found multiple offseason leagues to make additional cash in, or play overseas.
The WNBA responded to the strike authorization news as you would expect them to, given their complete dismissal of the reality of the situation and their current public-facing strategy of “we’re innocent, they are unrealistic bullies.” A strategy that, as Emma Lucia Llano pointed out for Fair.org, major media has been far too open to. They claim that the players are misrepresenting negotiations and the WNBA’s willingness to offer up meaningful change, citing all the stuff from their proposals that the PA and also analysts have debunked as misleading and not actually steps forward.
The WNBPA isn’t just going to authorize a strike out of nowhere — in order to strike, they have to believe that the league isn’t bargaining in good faith, to the point it can be legally proven when challenged. That the league continues to offer proposals that don’t fundamentally change anything on the revenue-sharing side, that only sound good if you don’t investigate further, that don’t bring the sides anywhere closer to ending this stalemate and seem as if they exist mostly to kill time until the players get nervous and further drop their demands while hoping they still qualify as “good faith,” well. I wouldn’t exactly trust this administration’s National Labor Relations Board to rule in favor of the players, but showing a willingness to strike might be enough to rattle the league when the clock starts to run out on the current deadline extension for a new CBA. Which is January 9, by the way — a lockout or strike feel pretty imminent now, if the league doesn’t admit that they need these players a lot more than they need the league, given that they have options to play elsewhere and the fact that they are in the right, too.
The National Women’s Soccer League has been going through it lately, in their attempts to navigate a problem without an easy solution: the salary cap is getting in the way of retaining top talent like star Trinity Rodman, who could very easily go to Europe and continue to be a star there, but the league and the union haven’t been able to agree on how to handle this. What doesn’t help is that Rodman’s team, the Washington Spirit, attempted to extend her with a deal that, if taken on straight annual value, would put them over the cap, but actually follows along the trajectory of cap growth by backloading the deal so that the bulk of the pay aligns with later scheduled increases to the cap. NWLS commissioner Jessica Berman vetoed the deal while accusing the Spirit and Rodman of circumventing the cap, and the NWSLPA filed a grievance in response.
The league is proposing a “High Impact Player” profile for certain players who could be paid outside the salary cap, allowing for special cases like Rodman — or the already departed Alyssa Thompson and Naomi Girma, who both play for the United States Women’s National Team and left the NWSL for the Women’s Super League and Chelsea — to stick around in the NWSL instead of leaving to be paid elsewhere. The NWSLPA has its issues with this tactic, with executive director Meghann Burke telling ESPN as much:
“We genuinely believe that how you measure a player’s value, both in terms of sporting merit and business criteria, is nuanced. It is more complicated than a handful of bullet points. It is within the purview of the teams to make those judgement calls, and in a system of free agency like we all agreed to, that’s how it works. It’s a free market.”
Instead of this HIP setup that carves out exceptions, the NWSLPA has proposed immediately raising the salary cap by $1 million for the 2026 season — the same amount of money the HIP rule would allow for, except it can be spent on any player, however a team feels makes the most sense, rather than being exclusively for top-end talent as determined by the league itself.
I’ve been impressed with Burke’s work as executive director to this point — she inherited a union that wasn’t focused on asking for a collective bargaining agreement due to fears it would cause more problems at that time than it would solve, and the NWSL abolished the draft in the existing CBA. Standing firm here and not letting the league decide how these teams spend money just because the NWSL is afraid of the public relations hit of losing another star to the WSL, and not agreeing outright to a proposal just because it means more money for a star, is another positive.
My latest for Baseball Prospectus published on Friday, and it was on the league’s plan to limit what technology and data could be utilized in the minors — basically, all vendors would be approved by MLB only, and it would reduce advantages for teams willing to do the research and spend the money and try for innovation in the field.
This one is available to Basic-level subscribers, meaning, you just need to have an email login, no money is necessary in order to read it. So I’ll save the preview of that and just tell you to go read it; just be ready for me to evoke Jeff Luhnow’s name. In a negative sense, of course. It’s no less than he deserves.
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