Former Kiwoom Heroes star Lee Jung-hoo signed a six year contract with the San Francisco Giants today, putting an end to almost a year's worth of speculation about where he was going to end up. Lee was actually born in Nagoya, Japan as his father Lee Jong-beom was playing for the Chunichi Dragons at the time. The younger Lee was a first round pick of the then-Nexen Heroes in 2017 and won the KBO Rookie Of The Year award that same year. He won his first batting crown in 2021 and followed that up with an outstanding 2022 - leading the league in batting, hits, RBIs, on base percentage and slugging percentage. He topped that off with the MVP award that year as well. He missed time this past season with an ankle injury but he still hit .318 (although that was the lowest average of his career). He's played with the Korean National Team in the 2019 Premier 12, the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and the 2023 World Baseball Classic. I think my favorite piece of trivia about him is that since his father's nickname was "Son Of The Wind", his nickname is "Grandson Of The Wind".
His first baseball cards were in the "2017" SCC set - I put quotes around 2017 because the set really didn't come out until 2018. He has a "regular" card (#SCC-01-NX18/N) and a "rookie" insert/parallel card (#SCC-01-NX18/RO) in the set. He's had cards in most of the major KBO sets since then and also had a handful of WBC cards from Topps this past year. TCDB has a pretty accurate list of his cards (mostly thanks to Dan Skrezyna's efforts at adding all the KBO checklists). Here's a handful of his cards - I haven't gotten any KBO sets since 2021 so my cards of his stop then:
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| "2017" SCC #SCC-01-NX18/N |
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| 2018 SCC KBO Collection 2 Red #SCCR-02R/062 |
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| 2019 SCC Premium Collection #SCCP1-19/088 |
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| 2020 SCC Premium Collection #SCCP1-20/H20 |
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| 2021 SCC Golden Premium #SCC-21/H18 |
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| 2021 SCC Golden Premium - Team Korea #SCC-21/H18 |
1 comment:
As a Giants fan I'm relatively excited about this. Even just a reliable hitter and good fielder will be welcome in our outfield and the fact that he's so young is very nice too.
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