When the San Francisco Giants signed Jung Hoo Lee to a six-year deal worth $113 million out of the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO), they envisioned an excellent contact hitter who could play quality defense in the outfield. After an injury-riddled debut season in 2024, Hoo Lee is surpassing expectations so far this year.
The former KBO standout is batting .333 with three home runs in 103 plate appearances so far. This led San Francisco Chronicle beat writer Susan Slusser to compare Hoo Lee to Ichiro Suzuki on the Foul Territory podcast. While this sounds crazy at first, since Ichiro is a Hall of Famer, a closer look reveals that this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.
Hoo Lee Is The Next Ichiro
When you do a deeper dive into Hoo Lee’s numbers, you come away extremely impressed. The Giants outfielder grades well in Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+), which is an advanced metric that measures a player’s offense while adjusting for park factors and current era. Hoo Lee has a 167 wRC+ coming into Thursday’s action, which ranks 15th in MLB.
“He’s pretty close to a five-tool player.”@SusanSlusser says Jung Hoo Lee can be “sort of a star” at some point. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/XTEMyIwb7J
— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) April 23, 2025
This is a player who has already been worth 1.4 Wins Above Replacement (WAR), coming in at 8th in baseball. That works out to about an 8.0 WAR pace in 600 plate appearances. When you look at Ichiro’s numbers, you see that his career-high in WAR is 7.1.
While it’s tough for Hoo Lee to maintain such a torrid pace, it’s evident that he’s here to stay as an emerging star. You have to love how he’s able to consistently put the ball in play like Ichiro, registering a 93.6% zone-contact rate, which is the 13th-most in MLB.
An interesting note about this comparison is that Ichiro is Hoo Lee’s childhood idol. Hoo Lee wore #51 — the same number as Ichiro — during his time with the Kiwoom Heroes in the KBO and continues to wear it with the Giants.
As Sussler stated on the Foul Territory podcast, Hoo Lee has a “K-Pop look to him” — referencing Korean pop music — so he’s definitely a marketable athlete who could soar in popularity. The Giants have been a scrappy team without any stars for a while now, but that could change with Hoo Lee’s emergence.
Here’s hoping that he really is the next Ichiro. It would be nice to have another star contact hitter in an era where home runs are prioritized.
his first name is Jung Hoo and last name is Lee