Free-agent outfielder Jung Hoo Lee has agreed to a six year, $113 million deal with the San Francisco Giants, sources confirmed to ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Tuesday. The deal contains an opt-out after four seasons.
San Francisco’s deal with Lee comes after the team missed out on prized free agent Shohei Ohtani, who signed a record $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The New York Post was first to report the news of Lee’s deal with the Giants.
Lee, 25, has been one of the top hitters in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) since he debuted in 2017 at age 18 for the Nexen/Kiwoom Heroes, going straight from high school to hit .318 and winning the league’s rookie of the year award.
The left-handed-hitting outfielder has topped .300 every season in the KBO and owns a lifetime batting average of .340, including a high of .360 in 2021. His father, Jong-beom Lee, was a longtime star in the KBO and regarded as the best all-around player in Korea in the 1990s. He was nicknamed “Son of the Wind,” so Lee’s nickname is “Grandson of the Wind.”
Lee’s best season came in 2022, when he won KBO MVP honors while hitting .349/.421/.575 with a career-high 23 home runs in 142 games and more than twice as many walks (66) as strikeouts (32).
Lee’s elite contact ability should help him transition to the majors. Hitting from an open stance — where he first steps forward with his front foot and then stops as he begins his swing — Lee struck out just 5.4% of the time over the past two seasons, compared to the KBO average of 18.2% and an MLB average of 22.7% in 2023.
The concerns are his power and whether he can stick in center field. Lee also fractured his ankle in July and missed the rest of the season, finishing with a .318/.406/.455 line and just six home runs in 86 games.
Some evaluators believe he has the speed to play a passable center field, assuming he returns from the ankle injury without any issues, while others project him as a right fielder, which puts more pressure on the bat. He has a very high groundball rate of around 60% in the KBO, which would be higher than any MLB regular in 2023 except Tim Anderson.
Still, most teams projected Lee as a regular. In a best-case scenario, he turns into a top-of-the-order hitter who hits close to .300 with an above-average OBP. There could be a bit of a learning curve here, as there was with Ha-Seong Kim, the last Korean star to come to MLB.
In his first season with the San Diego Padres in 2021, Kim struggled and posted a .622 OPS, but has improved to .708 and then .749 the past two seasons. Kim, a teammate of Lee with the Heroes, hit for more power in the KBO than Lee but with lower batting averages, owning a career mark of .294 in Korea.
ESPN’s David Schoenfield contributed to this story.