Lee Jung-hoo, who was in the spotlight as the batting king, can only see the top 20 NL outfielders in fan voting. How well do we have to hit to reach 3 percent?

Jun 17, 2025

Lee Jung-hoo, who was in the spotlight as the batting king, can only see the top 20 NL outfielders in fan voting. How well do we have to hit to reach 3 percent?
Lee Jung-hoo of the San Francisco Giants has not recovered his hitting sense even in June. ImagesYonhap News



Lee Jung-hoo, who was in the spotlight as the batting king, can only see the top 20 NL outfielders in fan voting. How well do we have to hit to reach 3 percent?
Lee Jung-hoo hits a triple on the right-field line in the fourth inning against the Los Angeles Dodgers on the 16th (Korea time). AP Yonhap News
As San Francisco Giants' Lee Jung-hoo raised his batting sense with a healthy body in the spring training, local media expected him to hit .300 this season. Some media outlets even made a rather exaggerated prediction that Lee Jung-hoo could become the batting king. He believes that he can hit a batting title with a batting average of .300 as long as he is not sick because he has such excellent contact ability.

The outlook of FanGraphs, a statistical media outlet, was not bad. The prediction system "Steamer" predicted that Lee Jung-hoo will play 114 games this season and post a batting average of 0.295 (135 hits in 458 at-bats), 11 homers, 60 RBIs, 60 points, and an OPS of 0.794 at 503 at-bats. He ranked fifth in both leagues in batting average.

Another forecasting system, ZiPS, had 103 games, 449 at-bats, a batting average of 0.279 (114 hits in 409 at-bats), seven homers, 50 RBIs, 48 runs scored, and an OPS of 0.737. Both systems predicted that Lee Jung-hoo, who suffered a shoulder injury early in the season last year and underwent surgery and failed to play the season properly, will adapt to the big leagues perfectly.




Lee Jung-hoo, who was in the spotlight as the batting king, can only see the top 20 NL outfielders in fan voting. How well do we have to hit to reach 3 percent?
Lee Jung-hoo maintained a batting average of .300 until April. ImagesYonhap News
At the beginning of the season, this prediction seemed to be right. As of the end of April, Lee Jung-hoo had a batting average of 0.319 (37 hits in 116 times at bat), three homers, 18 RBIs, 23 runs scored, and an OPS of 0.901. He maintained an NL batting average of 'Top 10'. MLB.com also predicted that Lee Jung-hoo and six other batters will definitely hit .300 this season.

However, Lee Jung-hoo's bat, which had been boiling in May, got cold. He hit only 0.231 in May. He has not had a hit in as many as nine of his 27 games in May, including three consecutive hitless games. It's even more jagged in June. He had a batting average of 0.205 (9 hits in 44 at-bats) in 13 games until the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on the 16th. Moreover, he missed the Atlanta Braves match on the 9th due to a recurrence of chronic back pain.

He, who gave up the third batting order, has been leading off since the game against the Colorado Rockies on the 11th. Coach Bob Melvin used spring trainer Lee Jung-hoo as the third batter earlier this year and said he expected his contact ability in chances, but he changed his batting order one after another to No. 4, No. 2, and No. 1 as the overall lineup fell and Lee Jung-hoo also showed a decline.




Lee Jung-hoo, who was in the spotlight as the batting king, can only see the top 20 NL outfielders in fan voting. How well do we have to hit to reach 3 percent?
Lee Jung-hoo, who is sprinting after hitting a two-run triple in the top of the fourth inning against the Dodgers on the 16th (Korea time). ImagesYonhap News
Lee Jung-hoo failed to add a cannon in 27 consecutive games after hitting his sixth home run of the season against the Arizona Diamondbacks on May 15. It's not a big shot, but the fact that no home runs are coming out means that the ratio of hard hits and positive hits has dropped. Lee Jung-hoo's exit velocity was around 90 miles in April, but has now slowed to 88.0 miles. This is a decrease of more than 1 mile from 89.1 miles last year, when he played 37 games.

His batting average fell further to 0.265 as he only had one hit in 13 at-bats in the recent three away games against the Dodgers, which drew attention as a rival game. He was sluggish with a batting average of 0.224 (34 hits in 152 times at bat) between May and June alone.

The problem is the future. How to withstand the summer race, which has no choice but to increase the burden of physical strength as the weather gets hotter. Although he played numerous full-time seasons during the KBO, the 162-game Major League race is different in terms of travel distance, time difference, and food.




How well should Lee Jung-hoo play in the rest of the game if he wants to finish the season with a batting average of 300. If the number of pars increases at the current pace, Lee Jung-hoo will play 335 more at-bats in the future. If you want to reach 30%, you can add 110 more hits. In other words, the batting average required for the rest of the season is 0.328.

Meanwhile, Lee Jung-hoo did not even rank 20th in the NL outfielder as a result of the interim tally of the first All-Star fan vote announced by MLB. Six outfielders advance to the second fan vote, which, let alone, failed to rank 20th out of 45 NL outfielders to be voted on.

NL outfielders are followed by Chicago Cubs Pete Crow-Armstrong (1126,119 votes), Cubs Kyle Tucker (704,740 votes), Dodgers Teoscar Hernandez (685,553), New York Mets Juan Soto (625,618 votes), Arizona Diamondbacks Corbin Carroll (597,805) and Atlanta Braves Ronald Acuña Jr. (596,363). Cincinnati Reds Austin Hays, ranked 20th, has 128,220 votes, less than a quarter of the sixth-place Acuña vote.

Lee Jung-hoo's vote is unknown in the current state of the vote released on the day, but it is difficult to guarantee 100,000 votes.





This article was translated by Naver AI translator.