Your 2026 Giants: Pivotal Analysis

Now, I am with most Giants fans that it has been an underwhelming Hot Stove season, it wasn’t even mildly lukewarm.  Hentges, Foley, Houser, Mahle, Bader, Arraez.  I was expecting a big signing of an ace level starting pitcher, to go with all their investments in Chapman, Adames, Devers, Lee, and Webb.  

Still, I was underwhelmed sometimes by Sabean, then looked at his changes by seeing how he is pivoting his roster, even if the moves don’t look like they moved the needle much, and found improvements, whether by addition by subtraction or adding a minor addition where it is still a huge improvement over the previous season.  So I will go over some examples of pivots I have seen so far in moves this offseason.

Your 2026 Giants: Jung Hoo Lee

There is a chasm between Giants fans about Jung Hoo Lee.  Some believe, but others saw some bad plays on his part (especially his bonehead throwing a live ball into the stands) plus his okay but not great hitting over the season, and just want to move on already, some moving him to LF, others trading him. 

ogc thoughts 

As I did with Bailey and Eldridge, I think Jung Hoo Lee could be a player who could provide at last another win to the 2026 Giants.  The Giants ended up at roughly average in CF in 2025, with -0.3 WAA, which is roughly 1.7 bWAR.  Jung Hoo Lee had 1.8 bWAR.

Lee Acclimation Season

Because of his season ending injury in 2024, 2025 was Lee’s first full MLB season. And, as expected, he struggled with adjusting to MLB pitching, just as other KBO hitters struggled.  Like his buddy, Ha-Seong Kim did with the Padres. 

He started out great his first month of this season, hitting really well for a couple of weeks, but then hit a really bad patch after three weeks and yo-yo-ed.  From April 19 to May 20, he hit .222/.246/.342/.588. Then from May 21 to June 11, he hit .274/.378/.403/.782.  The next dip from June 12 to July 7 was a sad .141/.236/.231/.467.  Altogether, a very average .243/.309/.395/.704, where the average NL CF hit .243/.303/.386/.690. 

But from July 8th, over 63 games, with no really long bad stretches, he hit a great .299/.355/.424/.779.  Which hopefully is similar to what his buddy Kim did for the Padres.  Kim produced 2.1 bWAR in 2021, batting .202/.270/.352/.622 (so basically for his defense), then improved to 5.0 bWAR in 2022.  Lee ended at 1.8 bWAR in 2025, though in his case, it was for his hitting, even as low as it was, because his defense was below average.  If he can hit that well for a whole season, that should add at least a win.

Some of that potential is captured in StatCast. Looking at his StatCast expected stats, Lee’s expected Battng Average in 2025 was .283, 88th percentile in the majors, and expected Slugging Percentage was .391, which was only 26th percentile.  His walks added .061 to his BA to get to OBP, which means he should have been roughly .283/.344/.391/.735, which is above average in the majors, and especially for CF.  

So just getting his defense to average could add another win, and if he can continue to hit in the high 700’s OPS, that could be at least another win, so maybe one or two additional wins. 

Vitello Effects

With Vitello taking over, that could help with improving his defense, which seems to be one of Vitello’s abilities with college players, and hopefully he can help Jung Hoo Lee improve himself defensively.  At minimum, I have to believe that Vitello has been all about pitching and defense at UT, because Posey has been repeating that as a mantra about how he envisions his Giants competitive strategy, and thus has been working on helping college players reach their potential defensively.  And Vitello started out his coaching career as a pitching coach.

Because, at the core of what Vitello was tasked with at UT, he is a Professor of Baseball.  He might have access now to the best amateur prospects to recruit, but when he first started up at UT, he had inherited a mediocre team which didn’t help in his recruitment, so he (and his team of coaches), out of necessity, had to teach players to reach their potential (and exceed them sometimes), both offensively and defensively, in order to build up the program to be the powerhouse it is today.  Analytics is at the core of what Vitello has achieved, and it must have helped players both offensively and defensively to reach their potentials. 

I assume these are what most attracted Posey to hiring Vitello:  

• the analytics that helped players so broadly, plus 
• his ability to communicate such insights to ball players so that they can execute on these insights on the baseball field (a huge challenge for any analytics program), and 
• also his ability to lead his team to be more than the sum of their parts, and 
• be cohesive and aligned to the goal of winning.  

Your 2025 Giants: Opening Day Roster

 The 2025 Giants Opening Day Roster is out, and there were some surprises:

• Catcher:  Bailey, Huff
• Infield:  Wade, Flores, Fitzgerald, Adames, Chapman, Schmitt, Koss
• Outfield:  Ramos, Lee, Yastrzemski, Matos
• Starting Pitching: Webb, Verlander, Ray, Hicks, Roupp
• Relief Pitching:  Walker, Doval, Rogers, Miller, Trivino, Rodriguez, Bivens, Birdsong

Your 2024 Giants: StatCast Hitters' Analysis as of May 2nd

There has been so much hew and cry about the Giants offense that I thought I would peep into StatCast's team stats and see how things look.  And as I thought, giant bad luck for the Giants.

Your 2024 Giants: Your Big 6 Prospects

Annually, if I remember in time, I produce a Big 6 List of Giants Prospects.  The 6 for this post are:

• Kyle Harrison
• Marco Luciano
• Jung Hoo Lee
• Carson Whisenhunt
• Hayden Birdsong
• Bryce Eldridge
• Landen Roupp is the bonus

I usually pull a lot of information from websites like MLB Pipeline, but you can easily read from there, and I don't have time to get all my research done as well as pull information in from other sources and get it out before more of the season goes by.  

Your 2024 Giants: Where the Roster Stands Today

I posted this comment, and given all the work I put into it, I'm posting it here.  I, of course, added some more content (I tinker constantly) and added headings.  Also, the Giants signed Jordan Hicks in the meantime, so I added some thoughts on that, but didn't add to existing projections to give more buffer for the projection I'm making.

I analyzed where I think the Giants are improved in 2024 vs. 2023, and how many wins that should translate into, and whether they can make the playoffs.

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.