After a first month of great results, his season has been dire at the plate.
If Betteridge’s law of headlines declares that “any headline with a question mark can be answered by the word no,” then let’s start there. Why can’t Jung Hoo Lee pick be an offensive force for the San Francisco Giants again this season?
We’ll start with the results. Since May 1st, he’s hit .205 with a .278 OBP and .324 slugging percentage in 245 plate appearances (59 games). He’s been the 12th-worst hitter in all of baseball during this stretch. It’s a heck of a fall from his stellar start to 2025, when he hit .319/.375/.526 in his first 30 games since returning from a torn labrum that ended his 2024 debut year in MLB all too soon. Take out those April numbers, though, and he’s basically been a replacement player during his time in MLB.
His Statcast page is far from impressive, though it has red lollipops in some interesting areas:
Squared up, chase, whiff, and strikeout rates indicate an ability to see the ball, but the contact data doesn’t show him doing much damage. That 9th percentile bat speed is a big ol’ ouch and places him in the range of struggling players and players whose best days might be behind them.
Then again, you’ve got that expected batting average which is in the red and if you look at his Hard Hit rate since May 1st (29.9%), you see that despite being in the bottom 30 of players, he’s tied with Detroit’s Zach McKinstry, who just got named to the All-Star team, and it’s still better than Luis Arraez, who gets results despite soft contact.
Arraez is a contact master (96.6% contact rate— 1st in MLB since May 1st), but Jung Hoo Lee is, too (87.% — 11th). But here’s the rub: Lee has seen nearly half of his pitches in the strike zone (49%) the past two and a half months, the third-highest rate in baseball among qualified major league hitters. Only Balitmore’s Jackson Holliday and Milwaukee’s Joey Ortiz have seen more pitches in the zone (49.7% and 49.5%, respectively); but, Holliday has managed to be about 8% better than league average over this stretch — about as good as Nick Castellanos — while Joey Ortiz has been as good as Jung Hoo Lee.
I think the secret is this: in the first month of the season, Jung Hoo Lee’s expected batting average against 95+ mph fastballs was .299. Not amazing (74th out of 215 players who saw that sort of velocity at least 50 times). Since then, it’s .231, or 108 out of 157 (about 30th percentile). That’s .260 on the season and about 47th percentile overall.
But back to the Since May 1st split: remarkably, Shohei Ohtani is just three spots below Jung Hoo Lee in this category with a .230 expected batting average against 95+. But here’s where numbers can be deceiving. Lee has seen that sort of velocity in 11.8% of his at bats, Ohtani has seen it 12% of the time. That doesn’t mean there’s a 0.2% difference, though. Ohtani has seen the pitch 33 more times… and he’s got 16 hits in 49 at bats to Lee’s 4-for-30. And, obviously, these are two different types of players. Ohtani did a lot more damage in those 16 hits. So did a lot of other hitters.
Yesterday, Shayna Rubin wrote about Jung Hoo Lee’s struggles for the Chronicle, quoting Pat Burrell and Lee himself via his interpreter. She also included some pitching measures in terms of where in the zone he’s being pitched, but those comments, her analysis, and the numbers here all paint one picture: we’ll see! Confidence can only carry a hitter so far. Sometimes, major league talent simply crushes the best intentions or hardest worker.
The situation certainly looks grim and based on the data and the eye test, some sort of stance adjustment might need to be made, which seems like an impossibility given how successful Lee has been his whole life with the swing he has right now. One positive is that he’s 8-for-27 here in July, and while a .710 OPS isn’t great, it’s not terrible. Beyond the wait and see approach, if Devers, Adames, Ramos, and Chapman can all get going at the same time, then there’s a chance that Lee sees better pitches to hit or he’s simply able to attach himself to that hit train as the caboose.
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