Jung Hoo Lee Appears as a Fresh Addition

Those of you who followed Premier League soccer in the 2010s surely remember the “Like a New Signing” meme that dogged Arsenal back then. At that time, London’s coolest and bougiest soccer team was managed by an erudite Frenchman named Arsene Wenger, who’d led the club to enormous success in the first decade of his tenure by the strength of his own wits and Thierry Henry’s legs.

But in Wenger’s latter days, Arsenal was overtaken by richer rivals. Manchester United, Chelsea, and later, Manchester City. Arsenal had rich owners, but not Russian oligarch or Emirati sovereign wealth fund rich. That left Wenger to compete with a more modest budget, and his limitless belief that his own intellectual superiority would compensate for any deficit in resources.

(I know it sounds like I’m describing the Rays or Orioles here, but it wasn’t quite that dire. The need for relative brevity is forcing me to be slightly unkind to Wenger and Arsenal.)

Anyway, while Man U and Chelsea were making record signings, Arsenal would pick up a series of equally talented but injury-prone players on the cheap. Those players would then get hurt, and Wenger would use their impending return as an excuse not to sign more reinforcements in the following transfer window. “Tomáš Rosický/Theo Walcott/Jack Wilshere/Abou Diaby/Aaron Ramsey/Thomas Vermaelen will be like a new signing when he returns,” Wenger always said.

It was a silly, barely credible thing to say then, but I’m going to repeat it in a baseball context without a trace of irony.

The San Francisco Giants, under new head baseball potentate Buster Posey, are in a situation not unlike Arsenal’s. They’re in a dogfight for NL West supremacy against numerous well-run and well-funded opponents, and watching some of their best players get picked off by direct rivals. (Blake Snell is Robin van Persie in this metaphor.) Extending Matt Chapman and signing Willy Adames is great, but it’ll only get you so far when the Dodgers have Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani, and the Diamondbacks just signed Corbin Burnes.

Well, I have good news. Jung Hoo Lee is going to enter spring training healthy, and when he returns, he’ll be like a new signing.

Lee’s first season in North America was pretty forgettable, mostly because it ended in mid-May, which was a long time ago. And Lee’s rookie campaign wasn’t going that well when he came down with a case of season-ending Running Into The Wall Syndrome. Lee hit .262 with a 6.3% walk rate and just an 8.2% strikeout rate. (That’s good.) But he posted a .331 SLG and a .069 ISO, and produced only six extra-base hits in 37 games. (That’s bad.)

Lee did hit for some power in Korea, topping out with 23 dingers in 2022, and hitting more than 40 doubles each of the two seasons before that. But overall, in the KBO he produced an offensive profile that doesn’t really exist in the Western Hemisphere, at least not at the major leagues.

In the 2000s, only six players qualified for the batting title while posting a double-digit walk rate and a strikeout rate under 7%. One was Tommy La Stella, who did it in the make-believe third-of-a-season of 2020. One was 2004 Barry Bonds. Mark Grace did it twice — five times in six years, actually, between 1996 and 2001. It’s been 10 years since anyone did it over 162 games: That was Victor Martinez, who placed second in the MVP voting and was intentionally walked a whopping 28 times in 2014.

Lee did it in each of his last three seasons in Korea.

Then there’s Lee’s GB/FB rate — more than 2-to-1 for most of his time in Korea. Which makes some sense. Lee is a plus runner, albeit without the Ichiro-type jailbreak swing you sometimes see from left-handed contact hitters out of Asia. Nevertheless, he’d expect to do well on groundballs. We don’t have infield hit rates for Lee’s time in Korea, but he routinely posted BABIPs in the mid-.300s there, topping out at .390 in 2018.

I don’t want to read too much into 37 games and 158 plate appearances, but it does look like Lee moderated his approach some. His GB/FB rate dropped to 1.37; even so, he managed to leg out six infield singles out of just 38 total hits in 2024. Despite some truly depressing surface stats — including the total evaporation of what power he showed in Korea — Lee exhibited some special bat-to-ball skills.

See that overall contact rate column, where Lee ranked third? The two guys ahead of him were Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan. If that’s at all representative of what Lee can do, he won’t need to hit for much power in order to be effective.

Writing up the Hye-seong Kim signing the other night got me thinking about how power transfers from the KBO to MLB. Turns out there is basically zero useful precedent to draw on. Over the past 20 seasons, only 12 position players born in South Korea have appeared in the major leagues.

And being born in Korea doesn’t have anything to do with where these players were trained. Rob Refsnyder was adopted by an American family as an infant and was raised here. Ji Man Choi, Hee-Seop Choi, Shin-Soo Choo, and Ji Hwan Bae all came through the American minor league system and appeared in the American major leagues before they played in the KBO — if they played in the KBO at all. Ironically, the “Born in South Korea” filter misses Lee, who was born in Japan while his father, also a pro baseball player, was playing in NPB.

In total, there are just three major league position players in the past 20 years who were born and trained in South Korea and stayed in the major leagues past the season in which they exhausted their rookie eligibility.

Ha-Seong Kim figured it out after a rough rookie year. Jung Ho Kang stayed about the same. Hyun Soo Kim regressed badly. And hey, since I mentioned Hyun Soo Kim, I have his theme song stuck in my head now. It’s only fair to get it stuck in your heads too.

So even though there’s no useful road map for charting a hitter’s adjustment from the KBO to MLB, I do have another specific reason to be bullish on Lee for 2025. It looks like he got completely hosed on batted ball luck. Those mid-.300s BABIPs from the KBO turned into a .273 BABIP in San Francisco. And even if defense is better over here, I’m willing to bet it’s not that much better.

Standard caveats about expected stats apply, but Lee underperformed his xSLG but 73 points last year, and his xwOBA by 35 points. Out of 410 players with 150 or plate appearances, those were the fourth- and 15th-largest negative differences in the league.

I’ll end on this point. If Lee does turn out to be the kind of center fielder the Giants believed he would be when they signed him, he’ll give them a huge advantage at what has become one of the shallowest positions in the league. Last year, 27 players logged 300 or more plate appearances as center fielders; only eight had a wRC+ of 100 or better in those plate appearances.

And those eight players include guys who wouldn’t be playing center field in an ideal world (Aaron Judge, JJ Bleday, Andy Pages), a last-second infield conversion (Jackson Merrill), and a guy whose team desperately wants to stop playing him in center field because he keeps dismembering himself on the outfield fence (Byron Buxton). The Giants got some great offensive production in center field out of Heliot Ramos last year, but his defensive stats at that position were absolutely horrific. As in, he finished dead last in fielding run value out of 51 players who logged 300 or more innings in center field.

Saying that a healthy and effective Lee would be like a new signing might actually be underselling the point. Considering the paucity of available center field options, Lee might be even better than a new signing.