SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — San Francisco Giants center fielder Jung Hoo Lee began last season as one of the most intriguing free-agent signings in recent franchise history. The batting averages he posted in the Korean Baseball Organization resembled Tony Gwynn’s statistics after huffing helium. His swings and misses happened once in a lunar phase. His contact skills were so supreme that the Giants confidently bet $113 million that he could walk out of the KBO and into major-league proficiency if not stardom.
It took just 37 games in a Giants uniform to turn Lee from highly anticipated to an afterthought.
It’s not that he was a disappointment or that he didn’t pan out or that he never adjusted to big-league pitching in the first year of a six-year contract. His season was not defined by relocation but by a dislocation. In a May 12 home game against the Cincinnati Reds, he jammed his left shoulder against the top of the center-field fence while trying to make a leaping catch. He sustained labrum damage that required season-ending surgery.
He was gone too fast to be missed, even.
“He got hurt so early you lose sight of how important he was,” Giants manager Bob Melvin said on Thursday. “We signed him to a big contract to be a really good performer for us. But when it happens so early … your team is what it is for 4 1/2 months or whatever. But there was a huge impact losing him.”
Losing Lee might have made an understated but important difference on an 80-82 team last season. Now the Giants are hoping his return will have the opposite effect on a club that aspires to sneak up on the rest of the National League.
“From day one (last) spring, you could see him make adjustments,” Melvin said. “He was understanding how he’s going to be pitched. I thought he was on his way to having a really good year. And we really missed him. I know there’s not of track record in the big leagues, but we still feel like he’s got a really high ceiling, he’s still a young guy, and he’s motivated to play well this year.”
The candid and private thoughts among team officials echo Melvin’s hope and optimism. They also acknowledge that there is no more hard evidence now than there was a year ago that Lee will thrive as an everyday major leaguer. He has to prove he can stay healthy, for starters. He simply hasn’t played a lot of baseball in two years. He also missed most of his 2023 farewell season with the Kiwoom Heroes because of a fractured ankle. And the shoulder dislocation last May was the second of his career. He had a similar procedure to stabilize the left shoulder capsule in 2018.
It’s a good initial sign that Lee will enter this spring with no restrictions. There are no plans to ease him into exhibition games or limit his innings. Although the Giants will ask him to be mindful, he won’t be under orders to stay on his feet while chasing fly balls or to be any less aggressive on the basepaths.
“There are no limitations told to me,” Lee said through Korean interpreter Justin Han. “If I’m playing out there with limitations, that’s when I’m not prepared for the game. For now, I am prepared.”
And he plans to stay prepared this spring. For every single exhibition game, if Melvin allows it.
“I’m not going to give him 150 at-bats this spring, but he wants it,” Melvin said. “He wants to play every day. He wants to play the first day. He’s eager to get back onto the field.”
The Giants are just as eager to find out what they really have. Lee was not an offensive dynamo in his limited debut season, posting an 86 OPS+ (where 100 is league average) and hitting .262/.310/.331 with two home runs and four doubles. He stole two bases and was caught three times. The Giants had to encourage him to run more and to be a little less passive on first-pitch strikes. Before he got hurt, they were in the process of working with him to alter his approach at the plate in the hopes that he could shoot more gaps and turn more singles into extra-base hits.
Lee was starting to implement those changes. He had a six-game hitting streak when the wall-crashing injury ended his season.
Jung Hoo Lee went 3-for-5 on May 7, 2024, against the Rockies. (Isaiah J. Downing / Imagn Images)
Even though his overall numbers suggested a below-average offensive performer, in one important respect, Lee was exactly as advertised. He wasn’t overpowered by major-league velocity; he saw 82 pitches of at least 95 mph and swung through just four of them. It was hard for pitchers to get anything past Lee’s bat. He swung and missed at just 6.4 percent of pitches in the strike zone — the third-lowest rate among 411 major-league hitters who received at least 150 plate appearances. The only hitters who swung and missed at a lower rate were the game’s two most prolific contact-hitting outliers: San Diego’s Luis Arraez and Cleveland’s Steven Kwan.
There’s a great debate raging about how the industry should value high-average, low-slugging contact savants like Arraez, who owns three consecutive batting titles yet has been traded twice during that span from the Twins to the Marlins to the Padres. Arraez, who hit four home runs last season, was worth just 1.0 bWAR last season.
Then there is Kwan, who hit 14 home runs while winning his third consecutive Gold Glove in left field. His contact skills combined with his defensive value and a little more pop made him worth 4.0 bWAR. If teams value a unit of WAR at $8 million, then Kwan, even while missing most of May with a hamstring injury, was a $32 million player for the Guardians.
Perhaps the industry is undervaluing a player like Arraez. Either way, the Giants will be in excellent shape if Lee’s more apt comparison turns out to be Kwan.
Lee certainly has the potential to create value on defense; he combined his speed and adept route running with surprising arm strength while playing a solid center field before his shoulder injury.
And Melvin sent a strong signal on Thursday that he believes Lee will be much more than a slap-and-dash hitter. The manager revealed a working version of the Giants lineup he plans to test in exhibition games that would move Lee from leadoff to the No.3 position. It’s a change that Melvin said would allow the Giants to amplify LaMonte Wade Jr.’s on-base skills as a leadoff batter. And sticking Lee in between right-handed hitters Willy Adames and Matt Chapman would allow the Giants to split up their lefties.
“I mean, Wade gets on base,” Melvin said. Someone’s got to hit third. So here we are, lefty-righty. We’ll see where that lineup goes. Adames fits pretty well in the 2-hole right now, Chappy fits in the 4-hole, maybe (Heliot) Ramos behind him. We’ll split those lefties up and see who gets on base a little more. … But it’s not etched in stone that Jung Hoo will lead off.”
Wade’s .380 on-base percentage last season was the eighth-best in the majors (minimum 400 plate appearances) but he scored just 45 runs due in part to creaky legs that made him a station-to-station baserunner. Melvin said he anticipates a more mobile version of Wade, who worked on his running and lower body all offseason. Wade was feeling so spry, Melvin said, that he volunteered to play some outfield in addition to first base this spring.
Wade is also nobody’s fool. He knows that first base will belong to 20-year-old top prospect Bryce Eldridge before too long. Eldridge, who zoomed from Low A to Triple A last season, will be in his first major-league camp this spring. Asked whether moving Wade to the outfield could allow the Giants to get another left-handed hitter into the lineup at first base, Melvin sniffed the subtext of the question.
“I don’t know that we start out that way,” Melvin said. “But performance is going to dictate how quickly the guy you’re talking about gets here.”
The Giants likely will dream on Eldridge’s impact for a while longer. In the meantime, this is a lineup that appears short on left-handed run production. It also appears that the Giants view Lee as a potential candidate to hit in a run-producing slot.
“He’s got some power,” Melvin said of Lee. “Watching him take batting practice, you see that.”
Lee was a No. 3 hitter with Kiwoom and broke out for a career-best 23 home runs in 2023. So he said he wouldn’t be intimidated if asked to hit in that spot. Asked what kind of impact he could make on the offense, he described himself as a team-first player who plans to take unselfish at-bats and take pride in sacrificing or situational hitting.
“Personally I haven’t shown a lot yet,” Lee said. “But I just want to let everybody know … I can be that player who can move runners. Be a team player.
“I just want to help the team with the team goals. I don’t really have personal goals at the moment. I’m not too pressured going on the field. I just learned that just being a good ballplayer for the team will make everything work better. So I just wanted to tell everybody that I’m coming into this team this season with no personal goals, I’m just trying to do what’s the best for the team.”
If Lee has a personal goal, it’s the same one he strives to achieve every year: improve from the previous season.
“The coaching staff has been putting in a lot of (work with) me, so I feel in a great mood right now,” Lee said. “There are so many people helping me right now. I just want to meet the expectations of everyone.”
Perhaps Lee’s early injury made him an afterthought by the second half of the season. There is always another game to manage and another roster fire to put out. There’s no bandwidth for a coaching staff to think about the players who aren’t part of the daily grind. But Lee’s presence echoed loudest in the stands, where hundreds of fans continued to wear his jersey every night. The Giants will give away “Jung Hoo Crew” T-shirts to fans who purchase seats in Section 142 of the center-field bleachers for all weekend games this season.
“I’m very thankful for all the love that I’m getting here with the Giants,” Lee said. “Even though I’m the one playing in the outfield and inside the box, I know if there wasn’t love from the fans, I wouldn’t be able to be here. I just want to show the fans and the team what kind of player I can be. I want to meet the expectations that everybody has.”
In the final weekend of last season, as Lee packed up his locker, a reporter mentioned to him that fans kept wearing his No. 51 jersey to the ballpark months after his season-ending injury.
“I noticed,” he said through Han. “I want to make sure to tell the fans that they’re not going to regret that they bought my jersey. I’m going to play my best for them.”
(Top photo of Jung Hoo Lee from Feb. 13: Rick Scuteri / Imagn Images)
