Jung Hoo Lee is playing like the superstars the Giants have always coveted

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The last time the Giants were at Yankee Stadium, they were eliminated from playoff contention six pitches into the season. In the bottom of the first inning on Opening Day 2023, Aaron Judge clobbered a high, arching narrative over the center field wall, and that was it. Technically, the Giants hung around the wild-card race for most of the summer, but there’s no way a franchise can recover from that kind of cosmic pantsing.

The Giants had spent the 2022-23 offseason declaring that they needed a superstar. They targeted Judge, who — and it’s hard to believe nobody has mentioned this before — grew up a Giants fan. It was a noisy, busy pursuit, and the organization wasn’t coy about their interest. They needed a face of the franchise. They needed someone who could win a game by himself, someone who could get the fans excited. They didn’t just need someone who could help sell tickets at Oracle Park, but someone who could help lease apartments at Mission Rock. Judge was the perfect fit, and everyone knew it. Especially his agent, who had to love the Giants’ obvious desperation.

Judge didn’t sign with the Giants, and in the first chance he got in 2023, he made them and their fans feel worse about it. The Giants were shut out on that Opening Day, which means that for at least part of that season, they had fewer home runs, runs and RBIs than the player who was supposed to fix all of their problems. It was humiliating.

And that’s the story of how the franchise was eventually contracted. Rest in peace, San Francisco baseball, 1958-2023. Good times were had by many.

There just might be a postscript to this story, though. Over the weekend, the Giants went back to Yankee Stadium, but this time they had more juice. They were off to their best start in more than two decades, and the focus was on the players who are actually on the Giants, if you can imagine such a thing. They won their first series at Yankee Stadium since inter-league play began, and the results made plenty of sense. They just might be the kind of team that can feel confident against anyone, even an ostensible contender on the road in miserable weather. And they didn’t need no stinking superstar to get to that point.

Except maybe they have one. Something the Yankees and Giants have in common is that they both have outfielders with a slugging percentage over .700. Makes you think.

Is it irresponsible to even hint that Jung Hoo Lee is remotely close to being a major-league superstar? Yes. Yes, it is. He’s not even 100 at-bats into this season. His next at-bat will be just the 200th of his MLB career. If MLB superstardom is the eventual destination, he’s still trying to make a connecting flight after getting hassled on his way through security. Trying to draw parallels between him and a future Hall of Famer and two-time MVP is premature, absurd and unfair. Above all, it’s deeply, deeply irresponsible.

So let’s keep going.

Because even if Lee finishes with a career that resembles Aaron Hicks more than Aaron Judge, this is about how everything feels at this second, right now, in the middle of April, in a season with so, so much time left. In the present, Lee is doing a pretty convincing superstar impersonation. He’s currently the player who gets Giants fans excited. He’s the player who makes other fans irritated and worried about his turn in the lineup. He’s also the player who’s been the most responsible for the Giants’ 11-4 record to this point, especially after his two-homer performance at Yankee Stadium helped seal the Giants’ third straight series victory on the road.

Two Jung Hoo Lee home runs.
Two awesome Korean home run calls. pic.twitter.com/yiZANcknlS

— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 13, 2025

The Giants have whiffed so often on free agent superstars that it’s almost easy to forget why everyone was so goofy for one in the first place. The Judge-Carlos Correa-Bryce Harper-Shohei Ohtani circuses were disappointing enough to overshadow when the Giants secured the services of very good and well-paid baseball players. They succeeded in their efforts to sign a perennial Gold Glove third baseman on a deal that included an opt-out after the first year, and they were thrilled to lock Matt Chapman up with a long-term contract. They had an acute need at shortstop this offseason, and they signed the best one available — Willy Adames — to a franchise-record biggest contract. Yet in the court of public opinion, those didn’t really count. Those were good players, maybe even stars, but they weren’t superstars. They’ll never lead their league in All-Star voting, for example, even if they’re off to a ridiculously fast start.

Those are excellent players the Giants signed — in this house, we believe that Adames will eventually make everyone forget about his first couple weeks — but they didn’t do anything to temper the obsession with the finding a superstar. Heck, my old boss just wrote an article this week about it. But why?

This feeling. This one, right now, where a player single-handedly turned a series loss into a series win and it felt completely natural. Yeah, that’s what we’ve come to expect from ol’ Jung Hoo. It was an example of that guy doing that-guy things at the plate. Chapman will have games and series like that, but they’ll typically come with superlative fielding, which isn’t as easy to anticipate as an at-bat. “Hey, kids, Jung Hoo Lee is due up second next inning” is something you might shout out, but “Hey, kids, Matt Chapman has a 10-percent chance of getting a ball hit to him this inning, and there’s a there’s a five-percent chance it’ll force him to make the kind of play that sets him apart.” You can appreciate the clubhouse vibes and the heady baserunning offered by several players on the Giants, but you aren’t texting your Yankee-fan friends to watch out for them before the series.

If you know a Phillies fan, though, you might have already sent one of those texts. They might have sent you one first as a preemptive strike. The obsession with a superstar goes beyond the real estate investments and dividend payments concerning the folks at San Francisco Baseball Associates LLC. It’s about the feeling fans get when their team has a player that makes the baseball world notice them. It’s the knowledge that other teams are kicking themselves for not getting there first. It’s been a long time since Barry Bonds hit a baseball that was headed for New Jersey, and while the Giants have had more fun than even the Yankees have since then, regardless of the superstar count, there’s still something about showing up in New York with that guy and leaving just as smug.

With that out of the way, let’s remember that this is incredibly premature. Aaron Hicks’ name was invoked as one end of an Aaron spectrum up there, but that would still be an excellent outcome for almost any baseball player starting his career. He played 12 years. He helped his teams win more than a lot of his peers would have. If Lee’s career looks more like that, it would still be a success relative to other players’ careers. Baseball is hard enough for the players with a chance to be slightly above average. There’s no reason to hang superstar-sized expectations on anyone before their 1,000th career at-bat much less their 200th.

Over the weekend, though, the Giants had a player who helped them beat the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. When the Giants left, Yankees fans were grousing about him with a mixture of irritation, respect and envy. Maybe Lee will be the talk of baseball for years to come, or maybe this is as good as it’ll get. But when you’re trying to remember what it’s like to have a superstar and why the absence of one has been such an obsession, here’s a little bit of it that got captured in a bottle. A lot more of it is what everyone around here has been clamoring for over the last few years. It’s not hard to see why.

(Photo: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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