Big Blue and Jung Hoo Lee Sign a Six-Year Deal
Jon Heyman of The New York Post says that the Giants and center Jung Hoo Lee have agreed to a $113 million, six-year deal.
After four years, you can choose not to be a part of it. Besides that promise, the Giants will also have to pay the Kiwoom Heroes a posting charge of $18.825 million. The Boras Corporation works with Lee.
Lee, 25, was considered a free agent over a long time and has been looked forward to by many teams.
In January, the Kiwoom Heroes from the Korea Baseball Organization said they would send him to MLB teams after the 2023 season.
He has always had good plate discipline, but last year he really stepped it up. In 10.5% of his plate opportunities, he walked, and in just 5.1% of them, he struck out.
He had never hit over 15 home runs within a season before that one, but he did it again and hit 23.
His final hitting line was.349/.421/.575 and his wRC+ was 175, which means he was 75% above the league average. The Golden Glove award was his fifth straight win, and he was named MVP.
His platform year didn’t quite go as planned, though. In 2023, he played in 86 games and hit.318/.406/.455, with only six home runs.
He hurt his left ankle within late July and had to have surgery to end the season. Still, teams like the Giants, Padres, Yankees, and Mets were all very interested in him before he was officially posted last week.
The player’s profile looked a bit like that of Masataka Yoshida, and she was also a foreign contact-overpower player.
Once he signed a five-year, $90 million deal with the Red Sox in 2023, Yoshida played in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball.
People usually think that the NPB is better than the KBO, which could make someone choose his track record over Lee’s. Lee had just had a great performance in 2022 at that point.
But there are a few reasons Lee might be better, and age is one of them. It’s not often that clubs can sign a daily player who is only 25 years old, and the fact that so many teams are interested in both Lee or Yoshinobu Yamamoto proves that they value youth.
Yoshida was obliged to come over for his age-29 season. Lee’s opt-out gives them the chance to go back to the free agent market before he turns 30. By then, he may have shown that he can play in the big leagues.
There it is! The San Francisco Giants had finally signed a famous free agent. From the New York Post’s Jon Heyman, we know that the Giants and South Korean left Jung Hoo Lee have agreed to a $113 million deal for six years.
Reports say that after four years, the deal lets the parties back out. The team has not yet announced that the player has signed.
Lee, who is 25, has been part of the Kiwoom Heroes of the Korea Baseball Organization for seven years and is one of the best players in the history of the league.
In his career, he has hit.340,.407,.491, hit 65 home runs, stolen 69 bases, and walked more times than he struck out.
This past season, Lee hit.318/.406/.455 in 86 games before he hurt his ankle in August and had to end his season.
Because he hit 23 home runs and hit.349/.421/.575 that year, Lee was named KBO MVP. He also comes from a family of nobles.
The KBO’s all-time stolen base leader is Lee’s father, Jong Beom. He still holds the record for most stolen bases in a single season (84 in 124 games in 1994).
Jung Hoo was the first player to go straight in high school to the KBO without playing in the lower leagues.
Over the past few years, the Giants have failed many times to sign big-name free agents. Most recently, they failed to sign Aaron Judge and now they failed to sign Shohei Ohtani.
But that deal fell through because of a problem with Correa’s hip. They had agreed to a 13-year, $350 million deal with him last winter.
The exact split of the contract hasn’t been made public, but that won’t matter for the competitive balance tax, which is based on how much a deal is worth on average every year. Team Resource has already put in Lee’s AAV and found that the Giants’ CBT is $189MM.
They might not be ready to spend more than $237 million on the team next year, but even if they don’t, they might still have about $45 million to spend on other players to improve the team.