Your 2024 Giants: Jung Hoo Lee is the Giants new CF

As announced and formally presented in the Friday press conference (seems prudent after last year to wait), Jung Hoo Lee has been signed to a six year deal for $113M with a player opt-out after four seasons. Per Andy Baggarly of The Athletic (subscription required):

Lee will receive a $5 million signing bonus and receive salaries of $7 million in 2024, $16 million in 2025, $22 million in 2026, $22 million in 2027, $20.5 million in 2028, and $20.5 million in 2029. He also has the right to opt out of his contract after the 2027 season.

They will also pay nearly $19M in Posting Fee to Lee's former team, the Kiwoom Heroes. Thus, they are paying out $132M for him, over the life of the contract. And the $19M does not get reduced if he should opt out after 2027.

There are a few other good article on Jung Hoo:

• Fangraphs: 2024 Top 50 MLB Free Agents
• Lee has been evaluated as a Top 100-quality prospect at FanGraphs since the 2020 KBO season. He is an incredibly skilled contact and defense-oriented outfielder with an important baseball lineage.
• Jung-Hoo’s career began in precocious fashion, as he was the first player in KBO history to go straight from high school to their top level of play; he won Rookie of the Year as an 18-year-old in 2017. Since arriving in the league, Lee has a career .340/.407/.491 line, has made elite rates of contact (roughly 5.5% K% and 11% BB% combined the last two seasons), and has had a couple of years in which he also hit for meaningful power. 
• Lee’s carrying tool is his Jedi-esque bat control, which he uses to deflect pitches all over the strike zone to all fields. His swing is incredibly cool and fun to watch, as Lee’s open stance comes closed very early before he takes a huge stride back toward the pitcher and unwinds from the ground up... His hand-eye coordination and ability to manipulate the barrel is amazing, however. 
• Hitters in Asian pro leagues tend to face premium velocity less often than upper-level domestic prospects and it creates a wide error bar in projecting whether or not their hit tools will translate. Using Synergy to isolate Lee’s performance against fastballs at or above the MLB average (93 mph and up) yields just 154 pitches combined throughout the last two seasons; he slashed .268/.348/.415 against them. Bump the bottom boundary up to 94 mph and he slashed .276/.300/.379 across 96 pitches. 
• If Lee doesn’t end up hitting for power, his center field defense will help buoy his overall contribution to a team. He’s a plus runner with above-average range and ball skills, and a plus arm. ... The most likely forecast is somewhere in the middle, and here Lee projects as a table-setting center fielder without much pop, though whatever the case, teams should be prepared to make a multi-year project out of Lee so he has time to adjust in the same ways Ha-Seong Kim has.
• Fangraphs: International Professional Players
• Current Superstars includes Jung Hoo Lee
• Fangraphs: Giants Finally Make a Free Agent Splash with Jung Hoo Lee Signing
• Lee immediately becomes the best defensive center fielder in a crowded Giants outfield group that was toward the bottom of the league in production last year. He’s a plus runner with above-average range and ball skills, and a plus arm. 
• The scouting and data-oriented projections for Lee are both quite strong, befitting a player who just signed a nine-figure deal. Here are Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for Lee:
• ZiPS Projection – Jung Hoo Lee
• Year         BA  OBP SLG AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB OPS+ DR WAR
• 2024 .288 .346 .416 476 56 137 29 4 8 62 39 38 2 111 1 2.5
• 2025 .288 .348 .422 486 58 140 30 4 9 63 41 38 2 113 1 2.6
• 2026 .287 .348 .420 488 58 140 30 4 9 63 42 38 1 112 0 2.6
• 2027 .281 .343 .409 487 58 137 29 3 9 62 42 37 1 108 0 2.3
• 2028 .282 .345 .412 478 57 135 29 3 9 61 42 36 1 109 0 2.3
• 2029 .281 .344 .406 463 54 130 28 3 8 58 41 35 1 108 0 2.2
• Those are the numbers of an above-average everyday center fielder. With this level of production, per Dan, ZiPS would recommend $132 million for a straight-up six-year deal. 
• ZiPS evaluates $113 million with an opt-out after four years as having the same value relative to projections as a six-year, $134 million contract.
• Readers should consider him a contact-only threat at the moment, but he has rare hitting talent, and it’s plausible that with added strength, a swing adjustment, or some other developmental intervention, the Giants could coax more power out of him over time. Here you can see what ZiPS thinks the high-end outcomes look like if that happens:
• 2024 ZiPS Projection Percentiles – Jung Hoo Lee
• Percentile 2B HR BA  OBP SLG OPS+ WAR
• 95%                 44 14 .339 .396 .496 147     4.8
• 90%                 40 12 .325 .386 .476 137     4.3
• 80%                 36 11 .314 .373 .456 128     3.6
• 70%                 33 10 .304 .364 .439 122     3.2
• 60%                 31 9 .295 .356 .427 117     2.9
• 50%                 29 8 .288 .346 .416 111     2.5
• 40%                 27 7 .280 .339 .398 105     2.1
• 30%                 26 7 .270 .330 .385 99     1.7
• 20%                 24 6 .258 .323 .371 93     1.3
• 10%                 21 5 .242 .305 .351 84     0.7
• 5%                 19 4 .230 .291 .332 75     0.2
• It may take a little time for Lee to adjust to the quality of big league stuff, but his glove will play right away. His signing brings an element of youth and excitement to the team that the Giants have lacked for the last few seasons.

ogc thoughts

Jung Hoo Lee was wonderful in his introductory press conference. He had quite the outgoing personality, and very cock sure of his abilities. It was funny that he roasted his father, who was sitting right in front of him! 

I’ll be buying his Lee #51 shirts and merch from the Giants Dugout once they come in, but was shocked to see that the Giants closed the one in Palo Alto, as well as the one in the Embarcadero, only two are listed in maps, at the ball park and Valley Fair. I guess I’m going to Valley Fair. 

Was shocked to hear nobody from the Giants met him, but it’s not the first time the Giants have done that, there have been top draft picks that expressed surprise that the Giants selected him because they hadn’t ever contacted him. Also, there’s the humongous fact that Pacific Ocean is pretty wide, and traveling there just to meet him would probably take up three days of a busy executive’s time during a crucial period of free agent pursuit, where he’s needed to attend the GM meetings last week, given Lee only was posted, I think last week, so very recent. 

Why I'm High On This Signing

It’s a huge gamble for an unproven MLB hitter, so there goes the complaints about Zaidi being too conservative and risk adverse in free agency. For all the talk about Korea being only a AA level league, I recall a certain good bat to ball hitter being promoted from AA to the majors, and the Panda hit great in the majors, then his power kicked in when he turned 22, much like Jung Hoo Lee hitting for more power in his 23 YO season. For some hitters, the ability to hit well appears to be evident from scouting alone.  

Furthermore, there’s a concept of MLB equivalency where the hitter’s AA batting line can be translated to an equivalent MLB batting line, invented by Bill James and some analysts still do that. I can’t do that, but from studying a decade or two of minor league stats, I’ve learned that it is a great sign of MLB ability to not only be a batting leader at the minor league level, but even better, doing it at a younger age than the league. So I feel good about his ability to hit MLB pitching, since he has dominated pitchers since he was 19 YO, which must be a much younger age than the league. 

Have no idea how old their league is, but I’ve seen people denigrate his abilities because there are journeymen MLB and AAAA hitters who go to Korea and hit well too. This is like AAA in that there is a mix of very young and very old in the league, and, of course the older players hit well, they have experience and physical maturity that enable them to now play well against lesser pitching. They are men among kids, relatively.  

Yet, just like in AAA, there are young guys in their early 20’s who are also dominating their league, and that’s a strong sign that they have the ability to hit MLB pitching. And Lee has not only hit well since he was 19 YO in the league, but has done it at historically high levels for the league, not just dominating currently, another good sign he’s MLB material. 

Still risky as hell betting $132M on an unproven MLB player. Much like the first wave of Japanese ball players coming over, and teams spent similar amounts of money on them too. And not unlike teams offering hundreds of millions of dollars on pitchers whose arms literally could be injured on the next pitch they take, and yet teams take that risk all the time. You have to have some conjones to make decisions like that in a billion dollar business like the MLB. 

So I like the acquisition. He should be a good enough hitter to improve on what we had last season, as well as better defensively, and be an overall improvement over last season. He likely lengthens the lineup as well.  Per Keith Law's evaluation, he thought the contract was for a 2-2.5 WAR player, so he was okay with it, and that aligns with Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections above.  

Giants Are Moving Into Wild Card Range

So the Giants are incrementally improving.  Given that the Giants were roughly around 1.0 bWAR for CF last season, Lee should be adding 1-2 wins to the team in 2024, pushing the 79 win team to 80-81 wins.  Plus Steamer currently has Marco Luciano at 1.1 fWAR, at roughly 2/3rd of a season, so if he plays the full season, he'll roughly be at 2.0, or average, which would be about 3 wins improvement, which would push us to 83-84 wins.  Steamer also has Kyle Harrison at a 2.0 fWAR pace (only 2/3 season projected, but he should be pitching the full season), which is 1-2 wins better than whoever you want to count as the third starter.  DeSclafani probably was the third starter and only produced 0.2 bWAR, so that would be 2 wins, moving the Giants to 85-86 win range.  So we are roughly in wild card range at the moment, depending on how Melvin manages the team relative to Kapler.

But we need at least that top of rotation starting pitcher that Zaidi said he is pursuing, in order to ensure that the team can reach the playoffs somehow, and hopefully it is Yoshinobu Yamamoto, though apparently there is also Roki Sasaki, both of whom where on the International Leader Board as Superstars, like Lee. Shota Imanaga is another name I'm seeing in rumors, as well as Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery.

That’s another reason to close this deal quickly for Lee, Yamamoto (and other pitchers) will likely want to see progress and improvements if he’s to decide on the Giants. That’s a reason why I think another deal should be closed soon, and why I’ve been pushing for Chapman, as that hopefully attracts Yamamoto or another top pitcher, and at minimum, improves things for our current pitching staff.  Plus, Chapman would add another 2-3 wins to the Giants, on top of the above, pushing the team to the upper 80's in wins.