Six big takeaways from Opening Weekend: Munetaka Murakami leads early storylines

Chris Towers highlights hot starts, velocity concerns, and early trends

There aren't many more exciting players in baseball right now than Munetaka Murakami. One of the most hyped players to ever come over from Japan, Murakami took his share of criticism this offseason after he settled for just a two-year contract with the White Sox, to the point where it seemed like too many forgot what made him such an exciting prospect to begin with.

But he's reminding us in a big way in the early going. With his homer Sunday, he now has three in as many games to open his career, becoming just the fourth player to homer in his first three MLB games. And that should be no surprise from a guy with four straight 30-homer seasons in Japan, including a Nippon Professional Baseball record for a Japanese-born player with his 56 homers in 2022. The power was always going to be here.

But it seemed like some missed that with the focus on his contact issues. Murakami posted poor contact rates over his final three seasons in Japan, leading to strikeout rates approaching 30% each season. Given the higher level of talent in MLB, it was reasonable to expect him to have some trouble making consistent contact, which is why he so often fell outside of the top 200 in Fantasy drafts this spring. It's hard to be a consistent contributor in Fantasy with a strikeout rate near 30%.

But it's never been impossible. You have to have outlier skills to make it work, but it's been done – heck, Nick Kurtz was a top-25 pick in most drafts coming off a 31% strikeout rate last season because he was such a dominant power hitter. Rafael Devers has huge swing-and-miss issues, but he is so productive when he does make contact that he's still managed to be an elite hitter. 

You couldn't value Murakami the same way we value those two guys, of course, because they've both done it at the MLB level. And Murakami's hot start certainly doesn't mean he's suddenly a superstar – I'll never forget Eric Thames coming back from Korea to hit 11 homers in April of his first season, only to struggle from that point on. But Murakami is flashing the kind of outlier skills as a power hitter that he'll need to overcome his contact rate issues. 

This won't last. Neither will Chase DeLauter's dominant start. These probably won't be the two best hitters in baseball forever, and Murakami especially figures to see a steady diet of breaking balls after seeing nearly 80% fastballs during his first three MLB games and demolishing them. It's always impressive when a player gets off to the kind of start those two are, but it also means they'll be under an even bigger microscope moving forward. The scouting reports are being generated as we speak, and the very smart people running baseball teams are working on ways to get these guys out. They'll figure it out.

Then, it'll be on Murakami and DeLauter to figure out how to respond to those adjustments. And then pitchers will adjust to those adjustments, and on and on goes the cat and mouse game, in perpetuity. The best hitters aren't the ones who dominate a league that doesn't know what to do with them – the best hitters are the ones who figure out what works for them and then figure out how to succeed when pitchers inevitably take that away.

We're a long way from knowing whether Murakami and DeLauter are those kinds of hitters. But they've held serve early in their careers, and that's all we can ask from them right now. Both DeLauter and Murakami should be rostered in all Fantasy leagues based on these hot starts, because you definitely want to see if this is for real. 

It probably isn't, if we're being honest. But I'm excited to see what both can do moving forward. 

And with that, the first weekend of the season is in the books, and I want to let you in on a little secret: I don't have a whole lot to say about the first weekend. The problem is, the last thing I want to do is overreact to a single weekend of action, whether that's in March or August. And I definitely wouldn't react to a random weekend in August, so I probably shouldn't react too much just because this is the first weekend of the season. 

But that doesn't mean I don't have anything to say from this weekend's games. On the Fantasy Baseball Today podcast Sunday night, we looked into everything you need to know from this weekend's actions, and in yesterday's Waiver Wire newsletter, I gave you plenty of players to add, largely based on what they did this weekend. In the rest of today's newsletter, we're going to recap the biggest news from the weekend and look at six big storylines from this weekend's games. 

But first: Let's get those lineups set for Week 2, shall we? 

Week 2 Preview

Week 2 waiver targets

• C: Francisco Alvarez, Mets (63%)
• 1B: Jake Burger, Rangers (38%)
• 2B: Brett Baty, Mets (44%) 
• 3B: Jordan Lawlar, Diamondbacks (53%) 
• SS: Ezequiel Tovar, Rockies (56%)  
• OF: Owen Caissie, Marlins (55%), Cam Smith, Astros (43%), Victor Scott, Cardinals (25%), Jake Bauers, Brewers (8%)
• SP: Emerson Hancock, Mariners (7%), Cody Ponce, Blue Jays (68%), Mick Abel, Twins (62%), Mick Abel, Twins (62%)
• RP: Lucas Erceg, Royals (23%), Jordan Romano, Angels (21%)

For more deep-league targets, plus my thoughts on each of those players and more, head here. 

Week 2 sleeper hitters

Best hitter matchups for Week 2

1. Blue Jays COL3, @CHW3 2. Phillies WAS3, @COL3 3. Braves ATH3, @ARI4 4. Mets @STL3, @SF4 5. Tigers @ARI3, STL3  

Worst hitter matchups for Week 2

1. Guardians @LAD3, CHC3 2. Reds PIT3, @TEX3 3. Yankees @SEA3, MIA3 4. Padres SF3, @BOS3 5. Pirates @CIN3, BAL3  

Top sleeper hitters for Week 2

1. Dansby Swanson, SS, Cubs (75%) LAA3, @CLE3
2. Carson Benge, OF, Mets (78%) @STL3, @SF4
3. Justin Crawford, OF, Phillies (76%) WAS3, @COL3
4. Gabriel Moreno, C, Diamondbacks (60%) DET3, ATL4
5. Brett Baty, 3B, Mets (42%) @STL3, @SF4

Week 2 sleeper pitchers

You can check out Scott's two-start pitcher rankings here, too. He ranks every projected two-start pitcher for the upcoming week, tiering them from must-starts to no-thanks. 

Top sleeper pitchers for Week 2

1. Cody Ponce, Blue Jays (68%) vs. COL, at CHW
2. Ryan Weathers, Yankees (76%) at SEA, vs. MIA
3. Braxton Ashcraft, Pirates (70%) at CIN, vs. BAL
4. Max Scherzer, Blue Jays (26%) vs. COL
5. Mick Abel, Twins (60%) at KC

Six big takeaways from this weekend

Emerson Hancock looked like a new pitcher

This one snuck in under the wire, but it was pretty huge. Hancock is a former top prospect who has put up an ugly 4.81 ERA through parts of three seasons entering 2026, so my inclination was to write off his massive nine-strikeout showing against the Guardians. But upon closer inspection, I do think this one is worth taking seriously.

That's not to say I think Hancock is suddenly an ace, of course. But it is to say that he wasn't just running it back from his earlier failed stints in the majors. Rather than prioritizing his sinker, Hancock went four-seamer first Sunday, and he learned a lot more heavily on his sweeper, too – he combined to throw those two pitches 79% of the time, compared to just 30% of the time last season. The four-seamer has been a better pitch than the sinker throughout his career, so that swap makes some sense, but the sweeper might be the key here. He got three whiffs on seven swings with the big, slow breaker, and he threw it 25 times – he threw it just 46 times last season. It is, most intents and purposes, a new pitch for Hancock, and maybe it holds the key to unlocking this upside moving forward.

Or maybe he just had a good start against a bad Guardians lineup? I'm open to that possibility, and it might even be the likeliest outcome here. I'm not saying he needs to be added in all leagues, let alone treated like a must-start pitcher now. But I'm open to that possibility, at least. 

And as for the concern that he might not have a rotation spot for long with Bryce Miller working his way back? Well, when it comes to pitching, no team ever truly has too much of it for longer than a couple of weeks, do they? Life finds a way, and if Hancock is as good as he looked Sunday, he'll make 25-plus starts this season one way or another. 

Mike Trout might be back

I toyed with making this one of my bold predictions on Opening Day season. Trout will probably never be the best player in baseball again, but I think too many baseball fans have perhaps forgotten just how good he was at his best. He wasn't quite on Aaron Judge's level as a power hitter, but for the first decade of his career, Trout hit .307/.422/.588 while averaging 123 runs, 40 homers, 104 RBI, and 26 steals per-162 games. He has slowed down in his 30s as injuries have caught up to him, but he came into spring feeling better than he has in years – and he had the sprint speed to prove it – and has looked absolutely dominant in the early going. 

He homered in the first two games of the season and added a stolen base in the opener, and he finished the four-game series with the Astros going 6 for 13 with seven walks and three strikeouts in 20 trips to the plate. This has shades of last year's unexpected Byron Buxton career year, and I think there's a very real chance everyone wrote Trout off too early. 

Cam Schlittler lived up to all of the hype

The increased velocity was there – 0.5 mph up on the four-seamer, but most notably, 3 mph up on the cutter, which was already a pretty good pitch. Schlittler is going all-in on his fastballs now, throwing his four-seamer, cutter, and sinker a combined 60 times out of 68 pitches total, and when your pitches are as good as these, why not? I suppose there is some worry here that this approach just doesn't have a ton of antecedents among current starting pitchers – he's basically throwing like a supercharged version of Lance Lynn? – but everything comes in between 95-99 mph with three different movement profiles, which sounds basically impossible to deal with. The curveball and slider are here, too, in case he wants to deepen the arsenal, though he might not need it. Schlittler looks like he leveled up this offseason, and he was already pretty good last season. Let's just hope his arm can stand up to all this velo. 

Emmet Sheehan has some concerns

Here's the one thing I haven't been able to quite shake about Sheehan dating back to last year: Why are the Dodgers seemingly so much less convinced about his greatness than we are? They would know better than us, wouldn't they? That's not to say the Dodgers don't like Sheehan, necessarily. But while the Fantasy community has viewed him as a budding ace, the Dodgers were skipping him in the rotation down the stretch and then moving him to the bullpen for the postseason, and they never quite fully seemed to embrace him as a no-doubt-about-it member of their rotation this offseason, the way we assumed they would.

He ended up in the rotation, of course, but there are some red flags here. Not so much in the results, though four runs in 3.1 innings certainly isn't great, of course. But the bigger concern is that Sheehan's velocity was down 1.6 mph from where he sat last season, and it just got worse as the start went on – he was down to 92.8 mph in the fourth inning before being pulled. We saw a similar inability to maintain velocity this spring, and that makes me think this is what the Dodgers are seeing that we haven't been. Maybe he just doesn't have what it takes to go deep into games consistently right now? 

It's only one start, so it's too early to panic about Sheehan. But if you were the person willing to push him up your draft boards this spring, this certainly isn't what you wanted to see. It's something to keep an eye on over the next few starts to see if Sheehan can start to reverse this trend. 

Zack Wheeler didn't quite look like himself 

Wheeler made his rehab debut for Triple-A Lehigh Valley Saturday, and while the results were strong – three shutout innings with three strikeouts – the radar gun wasn't quite where we wanted it to be. He averaged 93.3 mph on his four-seamer, down 2.8 mph from where he was last season, and it was the same across pretty much the entire arsenal. For someone coming back from Thoracic Outlet surgery, that's concerning, right? Well, the Phillies don't seem concerned, with manager Rob Thomson noting that his velocity is "normal for this time of Spring Training for him" – something that wasn't true in 2025 but was true in 2024, for whatever that's worth. 

For my part, I didn't end up drafting Wheeler anywhere this spring after we ended up not seeing him pitch in a game by the time the season started. That wasn't a concern for some, but for me, I couldn't take him without seeing what it looked like. And if I saw him 3 mph down in his first start? Well, I wouldn't have been taking him at his 116.2 ADP over the final week of drafts, I can tell you that. 

Maybe he'll be fine. It was quite chilly when Wheeler took the mound, and maybe he was just focusing on command or movement for his first start, rather than velocity. I'm open to the possibility that Wheeler can find the velocity, or, barring that, still be effective without it. But I'm not willing to take it as a given. I do need to see some evidence that he can still be the guy he was before this significant surgery. And I didn't see that in his first competitive start back. 

Carlos Estevez lived down to our expectations

Estevez might've lost his job in his very first appearance of the season. It was reasonable enough to give him the chance, even after a poor spring showing where his velocity was down more than 5 mph in pretty much every outing. Maybe there was something off mechanically he needed to fix, or maybe he was just holding back, and the adrenaline of a real game would get him going. I was skeptical, but given his success over the past few seasons, he earned the benefit of the doubt to try to fix it on the fly.

That benefit of the doubt is gone. Not only was Estevez's velocity still down significantly in his season debut -- 4.7 mph this time -- but he got absolutely crushed by the Braves, who tagged him for six runs on four hits, two walks, and a walk-off grand slam by Dom Smith. It was just about the worst-case scenario, though it was a worst-case scenario pretty much everyone saw coming, as Estevez severely outperformed his 3.69 xERA last season. Even if he just pitched to that level, he'd be a pretty fringe-y, but probably acceptable closer.

Instead, he has taken a huge step back. He might be able to get right and rediscover the form that helped him lead the majors in saves last season, but if he does, it's going to have to happen in some non-save situations. Lucas Erceg got the save Sunday with Estevez dealing with an ankle injury, and Royals manager Matt Quatraro admitted before the game that, if he used Estevez, "It would probably be smarter for us to try to build him a little bit in lower leverage first." That doesn't mean Estevez will never close another game again. But I do think it's very unlikely he'll be the Royals closer again any time soon. 

News and notes

Here we go again: Jacob deGrom was scratched from his start Saturday with neck stiffness. He said Sunday that it's feeling much better and he should be able to start Tuesday or Wednesday against the Orioles, but it's a frustrating way for the season to start. At least it's not an arm injury!

Andrew Vaughn was placed on the IL with a fractured hamate bone, and he's expected to miss 4-6 weeks. Jake Bauers and Gary Sanchez look like they'll form a platoon at first base for the Brewers moving forward. 

The Brewers also promoted catcher prospect Jeferson Quero, who made his debut on Sunday. It sounds like he'll mostly serve as a backup catcher with Sanchez handling his first base duties, but that also means Quero is probably the third catcher on days Sanchez isn't playing first, which means playing time will be tough to come by for the former top prospect. 

Josh Hader threw a bullpen on Friday and is still expected to face hitters in mid-April as he works his way back from a biceps injury. By the way: Bryan Abreu's velocity has been down a bit in his first two outings, and it was down more prominently Sunday, when he struggled to get out of the inning and was replaced by Bryan King, who closed it out. That's one to watch in the coming days. 

Tanner Bibee, who left his first start with shoulder inflammation, said he felt good after completing a 26-pitch bullpen on Saturday. The Guardians have yet to decide if Bibee will start Tuesday against the Dodgers.

Nick Lodolo threw a bullpen on Sunday. He got up to about 20 pitches, mixing in a few sliders as he works his way back from a blister. He'll throw again Wednesday, and then the hope is a rehab start on Friday, after which he could potentially return next week if all goes well. Personally, I'd rather he take as long as he needs after how a blister ended up ruining the second half of his season in 2024, so I hope he isn't rushing back. 

Joe Musgrove has resumed playing catch, but doesn't have a definitive timeline to rejoin the Padres.

Quinn Priester threw a pain-free bullpen session on Saturday. He's expected to miss the first month due to symptoms related to thoracic outlet syndrome. 

The Marlins placed Christopher Morel on the IL with a left oblique strain and promoted prospect Deyvison De Los Santos. He started Sunday against lefty Jose Quintana and has some deep-league appeal if he can recapture the form that saw him hit 40 homers in 2024. 

Just a heads up that Mick Abel pitched out of the bullpen on Sunday because the Twins didn't need a No. 5 SP right away. He should still be in the rotation moving forward despite a poor showing in relief. 

Mickey Moniak was sent to the IL with a sprained right ring finger.

Some lineup notes

Ben Rice, Trent Grisham, and Ryan McMahon are all out of the lineup for the Yankees on Friday against a lefty. Given that most teams do prefer to get everyone involved from the bench in the first series, this isn't terribly concerning, but it does seem somewhat noteworthy for Rice that Paul Goldschmidt did lead off against lefty Robbie Ray in that game. It might not mean anything, necessarily, but that caught my attention. 

Jac Caglianone was out of the lineup Friday against a lefty, while Carter Jensen was in. 

Lawrence Butler played on Opening Day but sat out Saturday against Dylan Cease and Sunday against Eric Lauer. They might just be easing him since he didn't play much this spring after undergoing knee surgery, but it's a worrying sign for those of you who were bullish on Butler. 

Oneil Cruz did not start against a lefty on Saturday. It might be a normal day off, but he struggled against lefties last season and had some pretty costly defensive miscues in the opener. His margin for error is slim. 

Isaac Paredes started all four games for the Astros and hit third in each of them. He got one start at second base and appeared in another at first base, so there could be some multi-eligibility here soon. Notably, Yordan Alvarez already has two games in the outfield, so he'll need just three more to shed that UT-only designation. 

Cole Young started against a lefty on Saturday. 

Kevin McGonigle got a start at SS on Saturday. They want that bat in the lineup, though we're still looking for two more appearances at third base so he can gain eligibility at that weaker position. 

Colson Montgomery got a start at 3B on Saturday. We'd love to see him gain eligibility at third, too.