Jung Hoo Lee is like a new signing

Those of you who followed Premier League football in the 2010s surely remember the “Like a New Signing” meme that haunted Arsenal at the time. At the time, London’s finest and liveliest football club was managed by a French polymath named Arsene Wenger, who had led the club to enormous success in the first ten years of his tenure through the strength of his wits and legs by Thierry Henry.

But in Wenger’s final days, Arsenal were overtaken by richer rivals. Manchester United, Chelsea and, later, Manchester City. Arsenal had wealthy owners, but not Russian oligarchs or wealthy Emirati sovereign wealth funds. This left Wenger to compete with a more modest budget and his unbounded belief that his intellectual superiority would make up for any deficit in resources.

(I know it sounds like I’m describing the Rays or Orioles here, but I wasn’t Enough how terrible. The need for relative brevity forces me to be slightly rude to Wenger and Arsenal.)

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

It was a silly, barely believable thing to say at the time, but I’ll repeat it in a baseball context without a trace of irony.

The San Francisco Giants, under baseball’s new potentate Buster Posey, find themselves in a situation not unlike that of Arsenal. They are locked in a duel for NL West supremacy against numerous well-managed and well-financed opponents, and watch some of their best players get eliminated by direct rivals. (Blake Snell is Robin van Persie in this metaphor.) Extending Matt Chapman and signing Willy Adames is great, but it will 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 will enter spring training healthy and when he returns he will be like a new addition.

Lee’s first season in North America was pretty forgettable, especially since it ended in mid-May, a long time ago. And Lee’s rookie campaign wasn’t going so well when he found himself with a late-season case of running-against-the-wall syndrome. Lee hit .262 with a 6.3% walk rate and just an 8.2% strikeout rate. (That’s fine.) But he posted a .331 SLG and a .069 ISO, and produced just six extra-base hits in 37 games. (This is bad.)

Lee has found some power in Korea, topping out with 23 dingers in 2022 and hitting 40-plus doubles each of the previous two seasons. But overall, in the KBO he produced an offensive profile that doesn’t really exist in the Western Hemisphere, at least not in the major leagues.

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

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

Then there’s Lee’s GB/FB ratio: more than 2-to-1 for most of his time in Korea. Which makes sense. Lee is a plus runner, albeit without the Ichiro-type jailbreak swing you sometimes see from left-handed contact hitters from Asia. However, he would expect to do well on groundballs. We don’t have internal hitting rates for Lee’s time in Korea, but he regularly posted BABIPs in the mid-.300s there, hitting a high of .390 in 2018.

I don’t want to read too much into 37 games and 158 appearances, but it seems Lee has tempered his approach a bit. Its GB/FB rate fell to 1.37; even so, he managed to hit six fielding singles on just 38 total hits in 2024. Despite some truly dismal surface statistics – including the total evaporation of the power he displayed in Korea – Lee has shown some special ball-fighting skills .

See the overall contact rate column, where Lee ranked third? The two guys in front of him were Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan. If this is representative of what Lee can do, he won’t need to hit with much power to be effective.

Writing about Hye-seong Kim’s signing the other night got me thinking about how power transfers from the KBO to the MLB. It turns out there is virtually no useful precedent to draw on. Over the past 20 seasons, only 12 South Korean-born position players have played in the major leagues.

And being born in Korea has nothing to do with where these players trained. Rob Refsnyder was adopted by an American family as a child and grew up 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 playing in the KBO – if they played in the KBO at all. Ironically, the “Born in South Korea” filter is missing Lee, who was born in Japan while his father, also a professional baseball player, played for the NPB.

In total, there are only three major league players in the last 20 years who were born and trained in South Korea and remained in the major leagues after the season in which they exhausted their rookie eligibility.

Ha-Seong Kim understood this after a difficult rookie year. Jung Ho Kang remained more or less the same. Hyun Soo Kim has regressed badly. And hey, since I mentioned Hyun Soo Kim, I have her theme song stuck in my head now. It’s right that you also get it fixed in your head.

So while there’s no useful road map to chart a hitter’s adjustment from the KBO to the MLB, I have another specific reason to be optimistic about Lee for 2025. He appears to have been completely defeated by batted ball luck. Those KBO mid-300s BABIPs turned into a .273 BABIP in San Francisco. And even if the defense is better here, I’m willing to bet that it isn’t That much better.

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

I conclude on this point. If Lee turns out to be the type of center fielder the Giants believed he would be when they signed him, it will give them a huge advantage at what has become one of the shallowest positions in the league. Last year, 27 players made 300 or more appearances as centre-backs; only eight had a WRC+ of 100 or better in those appearances.

And those eight players include guys who wouldn’t play center field in an ideal world (Aaron Judge, JJ Bleday, Andy Pages), a last-second inside conversion (Jackson Merrill) and a guy whose team desperately wants to stop playing. him in the center of the area because he continues to dismember himself on the external fence (Byron Buxton). Last year the Giants got some great offensive production in the middle of the paint from Heliot Ramos, but his defensive stats at that position were absolutely awful. For example, he finished last overall 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 belittle the point. Considering the dearth of options available on center field, Lee could be even better than a new signing.