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.
