The Giants view Jung Hoo Lee as a safe bet; the projection systems agree

It’s no surprise that the San Francisco Giants were attracted to center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, who was widely viewed as the best player in Korea.

He has desirable skills. He is exceptionally young (25) for an unrestricted free agent. His athleticism plays well in center field and atop a lineup. He walks more than he strikes out — and he almost never strikes out. Lee wears No. 51 as a tribute to Ichiro Suzuki, the player Lee patterned his game after while becoming KBO’s best player. All the while, Lee also was tailoring his game to suit the angles and expanses of the Giants’ waterfront ballpark.

But there might have been one surprising element to the Giants’ six-year, $113 million agreement with Lee: that a risk-averse baseball operations group fronted by president Farhan Zaidi, which almost exclusively limited its free-agent commitments to short-term contracts over the previous five winters, would lay down such a huge bet on a player whose competition outside of the KBO, a lesser league than Japan’s top professional circuit, amounts to a handful of international events.

The Giants’ internal projection systems looked favorably on Lee’s potential impact. It turns out the most frequently cited public projection systems agree. Whether it’s ZiPS or Pecota or Steamer you favor, all of them have Lee hitting somewhere between .275 and .291 with an on-base percentage between .344 and .354 and a slugging percentage of .414 to .433. He’s expected to hit between eight and 12 home runs.

According to Pecota, which Baseball Prospectus released this week, Lee projects to have an 11.3 percent strikeout rate — which would’ve ranked sixth among qualified major leaguers (behind Luis Arraez, Jeff McNeil, Keibert Ruiz, Steven Kwan and José Ramírez, and just ahead of Ronald Acuña Jr.) last season. And Pecota, by the way, is the least bullish here. According to ZiPS, Lee projects to strike out just 7.3 percent of the time. Only Arraez, the AL batting champion in 2022 and the NL batting champion last season, has posted a rate lower than that over the past nine years.

It also wouldn’t break any of the projection systems if Lee ends up walking more often than he strikes out. In most of the tabulations, his walk rate and strikeout rate are within the margin of error to even out.

His projected WAR? It’s in the 2.5-3.5 range. Even if Lee finished at the lower end of those projections, he would outrank the Giants’ most valuable position player (Wilmer Flores, 2.7 bWAR) last season. Insert sobering reminder here: Even if Lee becomes one of the better leadoff hitters in the NL in his first season, the Giants still need to be able to drive him in.

Check out Lee's projections (in green). Exceptionally narrow range of projected outcomes among all the different systems given he's never taken an MLB at-bat.

AVG: .285 to .291
OBP: .346 to .354
SLG: .416 to .433
wRC+: 110 to 116 pic.twitter.com/9Pg48LhQZ8

— Ben Kaspick (@BenKaspick) February 4, 2024

Of course, numbers on a computer screen are just numbers. Pixels don’t equate to parades. The proof will come when Lee competes against major-league pitching and begins to demonstrate his defensive ability. And the Giants have reason beyond the data to feel confident that their investment will pay off. They can just listen to what their new third base coach has to say.

Matt Williams managed the KBO’s Kia Tigers in 2020-21. He knows first hand how difficult Lee can make life on opposing pitchers.

“There’s only 10 teams in the league so we had a chance to play against (Kiwoom) a lot,” Williams said. “He’s really, really good. He’s one of those players you watch and go, ‘Wow, he just does everything right.’ He’s a good defender, a premier hitter in that league. And the intangibles are there as well. Good baserunner. Understands the game. From what I saw from the opposing dugout, he seemed to be a good teammate and willing to help and cheer everybody on.

“I really enjoyed what I experienced of the Korean culture from players there: respect the game, respect your teachers and coaches, play with intensity and have a lot of fun doing it. He’s going to bring all of that.”

Jung Hoo #Lee wearing Louis Vuitton !! pic.twitter.com/NbJ1j3c8Ar

— Joseph Kim (@blackwings2011) February 1, 2024

But what about those bat-to-ball skills?

Williams acknowledged that the average fastball in KBO is under 90 mph. He pointed to the success that Lee’s friend and former Kiwoom teammate, Ha-Seong Kim, experienced with the San Diego Padres last season. But the transition wasn’t easy. Kim also was 25 when he played his first season in 2021 with the Padres and struggled to a .202 average and 73 OPS+ (where 100 is league average). Then Kim improved from a 2.1 bWAR player to a 5.0 bWAR player in 2022. He was even better last season, when his 5.8 bWAR ranked 11th among all major-league players.

Kim’s manager in San Diego for the past two seasons, by the way, will be Lee’s manager in San Francisco. It was Bob Melvin’s push to make Kim an everyday player that helped to unlock his potential. In the process, Kim became the most successful KBO crossover in major-league history.

The Giants are hoping that by the end of the decade, Kim will be considered the second most successful KBO crossover. It might not be fair to expect Lee to be a .300 hitter and an All-Star from the get-go. But Williams is confident that the ascent is coming. Even better than that, he views Lee as the kind of player that can anchor a World Series winner.

“There are a few things I look at with him,” Williams said. “What does he do when he doesn’t have the bat in his hands? How can he impact the game? You can stand in the box and hit and that’s great but what happens when you get on base? To me, that’s probably his best trait. He understands the game and loves to play.”

Lee met with reporters at Incheon International Airport last week before traveling from Seoul to the Giants’ spring training home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He said he has held several Zoom meetings with Melvin and the coaching staff and hoped that arriving in camp two weeks before the reporting date for position players would help him settle in quickly.

“Since I’ve never played ball in the US, I can’t predict how well I’ll do there,” Lee was quoted as saying by Yonhap News Agency. “My primary goal is to make adjustments. Once I grow accustomed to the new league, then I will be able to start carving out my own presence.

“(Melvin) said everyone will always be ready to help me, and I really appreciated that. He said if I can get comfortable and just play the way I did in Korea, I should have similarly good results in the majors.”

Lee has proven to be a quick study in the past. He wasn’t viewed as the most physically gifted player out of high school despite his genetics — his father, Jong Beom Lee, was widely viewed as Korea’s best player in the 1990s — yet he hit .324 as an 18-year-old in his pro debut in 2017. Lee changed his swing to add more power and hit 15 home runs in 2020, when KBO played 140 games amid the COVID-19 pandemic. For a while as the world shut down, Korean baseball was the only sport going.

It wasn’t the experience that Williams expected in October 2019 when he agreed to a three-year contract to manage Kia. He’s still stunned at how that whirlwind process played out. Williams had planned to stay with Melvin on the Oakland A’s staff when he learned from a mutual friend that Kia was interested in speaking to him.

“I thought, ‘OK, a conversation won’t hurt,'” Williams said. “And then I was told, ‘No, they’re already on a plane to Los Angeles to present you with a contract.’ We met at a hotel by the airport and five minutes into the meeting, I’m holding the contract in my hands. So I had a decision to make.”

Williams, who was voted the National League’s Manager of the Year with the Washington Nationals in 2014, received no such accolades in Korea. The Tigers didn’t have the talent to compete. They finished ninth out of 10 teams with a 58-75 record in 2021 and Williams was let go with one more season on his contract. He says none of that detracted from his experience.

“It turned out to be a fantastic experience,” Williams said. “We were the only league playing. It was COVID and difficult at times and we had stringent rules and regulations. But I got to experience a different culture. I got the chance to coach and view some of the best players in Korea. It was fun and challenging at the same time.”

Williams traveled a long way to end up back in his baseball home. The former Giants All-Star third baseman is now their third base coach. And whenever the Giants’ new leadoff hitter sprints away from second base on a one-out single for the first time, Williams should have a pretty good mental stopwatch on whether to send him.

“They had their scouts watching him on an extended basis,” Williams said of Lee. “They didn’t need my opinion. But I think the team’s going to be much better for having him.”

For what it’s worth, the number crunchers agree.

(Photo of Lee from his introductory press conference at Oracle Park: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)