It’s several hours old news now, but let’s talk about Jung Hoo Lee needing to get an MRI on his back. He missed the entire weekend of games after waking up Saturday morning “with back discomfort” and is now in a bit of jeopardy to miss the start of the regular season.
With any luck, we’ll have the news of the MRI shortly and it will be positive news — just slept on the wrong side of the bed or accidentally fell asleep with his wallet in his back pocket (a really unhealthy thing I hope most people have stopped doing!). The downside is too treacherous to consider right now, given how much excitement the San Francisco Giants have generated in Spring Training.
Lee’s performance has been a part of that. He’s slated to hit in the #3 spot in the regular season, you know. His triple slash of .300/.400/.567 is great to see. If he can make it back in time for the exhibition series back in San Francisco, then all should be well enough (unless or until the issue crops up again). If he’s questionable for that, well, then it’s certain he’ll start the season on the IL.
If Lee can’t go, the discussion online is that Grant McCray will roam centerfield for the orange and black when they head to Cincinnati. If you’ve been paying attention, then you’ve seen (or heard about) McCray’s great spring — .297/.422/.486, which includes a pair of doubles, a triple, and a homer, but more importantly, 7 walks against 12 strikeouts.
This is where the calculation starts to get a little iffy. Nobody doubts McCray’s glove, and it’s very well a slight upgrade in center over Lee, but there’s a lot of swing and miss in his bat and the history of baseball has shown us time and again that spring numbers usually don’t translate to the regular season. Now, McCray doesn’t have to strike out much less if he is able to do damage on contact, but it’s that strikeout percentage that could wind up hurting the team if Lee is out for a length of time.
Pitching and defense is the only way the Giants figure to contend this year, but within that, there are limits to how much negative value a bat can provide before the defensive value gets wiped out. Can the team survive having two Patrick Baileys in the lineup? Probably not.
And then there’s the whole thing about Jung Hoo Lee’s career. His labrum tear is, plausibly, an injury that will recur. That one caused him to miss most of 2024. He missed the second half of his 2023 in Korea with a broken ankle. It was almost exactly a year ago that Dr. Ken Akizuki — the team doctor who will be examining Jung Hoo Lee — determined that Ethan Small had an oblique strain and would need to be shutdown for “several weeks.” The obliques are located… in the back. So, this could remove yet another Minesweeperesque chunk of time from Jung Hoo Lee’s career and cement a label on him as an “injury guy.” Given Farhan Zaidi’s model and player pursuit predilections, this would seem to be predictive, but I think you’d agree that if this winds up being the case that it’d stink.
So, rather than contemplate the huge bummer that’s potentially on the horizon, I’m going to choose some optimism here and figure that the team’s pitching and defense will be enough to weather the storm and that the storm will pass and Jung Hoo Lee will be fine.
Still, in a spring of exponential growth-levels of optimism, this news is a bit of a setback.
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