For most of the 2026 season, South Korea’s three regular position players in Major League Baseball have given fans on both sides of the Pacific plenty of reasons to pay attention. Lee Jung-hoo has spent the year establishing himself as a legitimate everyday outfielder for the San Francisco Giants. Kim Ha-sung has tried to rebuild a career that once made him one of the National League’s most reliable defensive shortstops. Song Sung-moon has worked to carve out a bench role with the San Diego Padres as a rookie infielder. Three different organizations, three different roles, three very different career arcs. And then, on the same night in the second-to-last week of the regular season, all three of them went cold at once.
On September 17 in Korean time, Lee Jung-hoo went 0-for-4 with a walk in a road game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. Kim Ha-sung went 0-for-3 against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, extending a hitless streak that reached four straight games. Song Sung-moon, given a rare chance to swing the bat for the Padres, struck out. None of the three lines was catastrophic in isolation — hitless nights happen to everyone in a 162-game season — but stacked together, on the same calendar day, they added up to a small, strange coincidence that Korean baseball outlets immediately noticed: the country’s three big-league regulars had, as one headline put it, gone silent as if they’d planned it together.
The Numbers Behind the Slump
Lee Jung-hoo’s 0-for-4 dropped his season batting average to .274, built on 145 hits in 529 at-bats — still a respectable overall mark for a full season of major league at-bats, and nowhere close to alarming on its own. What stands out is the shape of his last two and a half weeks. Over his most recent 15 games, Lee has managed just 8 hits in 54 at-bats, a .148 average that would be closer to a backup catcher’s line than an everyday outfielder’s. For a player who has built his reputation in both the KBO League and MLB on contact skill and a compact, difficult-to-fool swing, a stretch that cold is a genuine outlier, not just a quiet week.
Kim Ha-sung’s numbers are more dramatic still. His hitless game against the Cubs was his fourth in a row, and it pushed his season batting average down to .123, built on just 14 hits in 114 at-bats. To put that in context for readers unfamiliar with what a rough MLB season actually looks like at the extreme end: a .123 average over 114 at-bats is a mark you would ordinarily expect to see from a pitcher hitting in the years before the universal designated hitter, not from a player who was brought in as a starting-caliber shortstop. It is not simply a slump in the conversational sense of the word — it is one of the most difficult offensive stretches a semi-regular position player can have in the modern game.
Song Sung-moon’s situation is different in scale but similar in shape. As the least established of the three — a rookie still working his way into consistent playing time — his strikeout on a rare start came with lower stakes than Lee’s or Kim’s performances, but it fit the same pattern on the same night: a Korean bat that didn’t produce when it had the chance.
Why These Three Names Matter to American Fans
Lee Jung-hoo and Kim Ha-sung aren’t obscure imports padding out a bench — they are two of the more closely watched cross-Pacific signings of the past several years, and their contracts tell part of the story of how seriously major league front offices have come to take Korean position players.
Lee signed with the Giants in December 2023 on a six-year, $113 million contract, the largest deal any Korean position player has ever received from a major league club. That number alone tells you how much San Francisco believed in his bat-to-ball skills translating from the KBO League, where he built a reputation as one of the most difficult hitters in the country to strike out. For most of 2026, that bet has looked reasonable — a .274 average across a full season is a solid everyday contribution. It’s only in this specific stretch, right as the calendar turns toward October, that the numbers have started to look shaky.
Kim Ha-sung’s path to this point has been considerably rockier. After building his reputation with the San Diego Padres as a slick-fielding shortstop capable of playing multiple infield positions at a high level, Kim signed a two-year, $29 million contract with the Tampa Bay Rays as a free agent. That deal was undermined almost immediately by a shoulder labrum injury that limited him for much of the year and never let him find his timing at the plate. Kim was moved to the Atlanta Braves last September, and rather than testing an uncertain free agent market again this past offseason, he re-signed with Atlanta on a one-year, $20 million “prove-it” deal for 2026 — reportedly turning down a four-year, $48 million offer from another club in the process, betting on himself to rebuild his value with a healthy platform season. A .123 batting average in the stretch run is about as far from that plan as a season can go.
For American readers who don’t follow Korean baseball closely, the relevant context is this: both players arrived in MLB with a specific reputation — contact-oriented hitters who put the ball in play and rarely struck out, the kind of skill set that scouts trust to survive a slump because a player who makes consistent contact is supposed to have a shorter cold streak than a pure power hitter. That’s what makes a four-game hitless streak and a 15-game .148 stretch notable for these two specifically. It isn’t just that they’re slumping — it’s that they’re slumping in the part of their games that was supposed to be the most stable.
The Timing Makes It Worse
Baseball slumps are, in the abstract, a normal and unavoidable part of a long season. Every hitter in the major leagues, no matter how good, goes through stretches where nothing falls in and the strike zone looks smaller than it is. What makes this particular moment sting more than a similar slump would in June is simply the calendar. Both the Giants and the Braves are in the part of the season where every game carries additional weight, where roster construction for the following year is already being quietly discussed in front offices, and where a hot or cold week can shape the offseason narrative around a player regardless of how the rest of his season went.
For Kim Ha-sung in particular, the stakes are sharper. He chose the one-year “prove-it” contract specifically to set up a stronger free agent case for 2027. A strong final month, even after a difficult season overall, can go a long way toward convincing teams that the underlying skill is still there and the poor overall numbers were a product of injury and lost development time rather than genuine decline. A weak final month does the opposite — it risks cementing the .123 stretch as the lasting image of his walk year, however unfair that framing might be given everything that preceded it.
Lee Jung-hoo doesn’t face the same immediate contractual pressure — he is only in the second season of a six-year commitment from the Giants, and no one in San Francisco is going to reevaluate a $113 million investment because of a bad two and a half weeks in September. But the timing still matters in a softer sense: how a young, high-investment import finishes his first full healthy MLB season shapes the public narrative around him heading into an offseason where the Giants’ outfield mix, lineup construction, and expectations for 2027 will all be discussed using this season as the reference point.
A Small Rookie Footnote, With Its Own Stakes
Song Sung-moon’s situation is worth separating from the other two, because the stakes are different even if the surface-level result — no production on the same night — looks the same. As a rookie still working to establish himself in a crowded San Diego infield picture, every start and every at-bat functions as an audition for more playing time, whether in September call-up innings this year or a bigger role next spring. A single strikeout in a limited chance isn’t damning on its own, but it’s also not the kind of moment that helps a young player make his case for more everyday at-bats down the stretch, at a time when teams are increasingly using the season’s final weeks to make decisions about which young players get extended looks going into the following year.
Reading a .123 Average Correctly
It’s worth pausing on just how rare a .123 batting average is for a player who is still active on a major league roster in the middle of September, rather than buried in the minor leagues or released outright. In a typical season, a hitter who falls that far below the league-average line — MLB hitters as a group usually bat somewhere in the .240 to .250 range — is usually removed from an everyday role within a matter of weeks, either benched in favor of a platoon partner or optioned down to Triple-A to work things out away from the spotlight. That Kim Ha-sung has remained a rostered, semi-regular presence for Atlanta through this stretch says as much about the organization’s patience and his defensive value as it does about any lingering hope that his bat will suddenly turn around in the season’s final weeks.
That patience isn’t unconditional or without precedent. Kim built enough equity during his Padres years — including a Gold Glove-caliber reputation at shortstop and a track record of double-digit home run, double-digit stolen base seasons — that teams are still willing to carry him through a rough stretch on the strength of what he’s shown he can do when healthy. The injury history matters here too: the shoulder labrum tear that cost him time with Tampa Bay never fully allowed him to get into a rhythm, and shoulder injuries in particular are notorious in baseball for sapping bat speed and timing long after a player is technically healthy enough to take the field. None of that excuses a .123 average, but it does explain why the Braves’ front office has continued to write his name into the lineup rather than pulling the plug on his season entirely.
Two Different Kinds of Pressure
It’s worth drawing out just how differently these two slumps will be remembered, because the underlying pressure on each player is fundamentally different in shape. Lee Jung-hoo’s slump is a performance blip inside a long-term, fully guaranteed contract; the Giants have five more years to figure out how his season fits into the larger picture, and a bad three weeks in September of year two will barely register against that timeline once the calendar turns to spring training. His .274 season average, even bracketed by an ugly recent stretch, remains the kind of number that keeps him penciled into an everyday outfield spot without much internal debate.
Kim Ha-sung’s slump carries a completely different kind of weight because of the contract structure surrounding it. A one-year “prove-it” deal is, by definition, an audition — every game is data that other thirty teams are watching heading into an offseason where Kim will again be a free agent. Players in Kim’s position often talk about needing to “finish strong” specifically because evaluators disproportionately weight recent performance over full-season numbers when setting free agent value, rightly or wrongly. A .123 average over his last stretch of games, regardless of how it’s explained by injury history or defensive value, is the kind of number that shows up prominently in the trade and free agency conversations that will define his winter.
What a Cold Night Looks Like From the Other Side of the Pacific
It’s worth noting how this story is being covered in South Korea versus how it might read to an American baseball fan encountering these three names for the first time. In Korea, all three of these players carry outsized cultural significance — they are proof, to Korean fans, that the country’s baseball development pipeline can produce major league-caliber talent across multiple skill types: a batting champion turned outfielder in Lee, a slick-fielding two-way infield asset in Kim, and now a new generation of prospects like Song trying to follow the same path. When all three struggle on the same night, Korean sports media treats it less as three unrelated bad games and more as a single, symmetrical data point worth flagging — a snapshot of how the country’s MLB exports are doing collectively at a specific moment in the calendar, rather than three isolated box scores.
For an American reader without that context, the more useful frame is simpler: these are three legitimate major league rosters spots held by Korean players, at three different career stages, and on one specific night in the second-to-last week of September, none of them produced. It’s a coincidence of scheduling more than anything else — the Giants, Braves, and Padres don’t share a division or a rival, and there’s no competitive link between the three games beyond the fact that all three happened to be played on the same calendar day. But it’s exactly the kind of coincidence that makes for an easy story to tell, and an easy one to forget the moment any of the three has a three-hit night next week.
What Comes Next
None of this changes the bigger picture for any of the three players. Lee Jung-hoo remains a well-paid, well-regarded everyday outfielder with five years still remaining on his contract after this one, and a .274 season average is nothing to be alarmed about even with a rough final stretch layered on top of it. Kim Ha-sung remains a talented defensive infielder trying to rebuild trust with the league on a one-year deal, and the ultimate read on his 2026 season will depend far more on his health track record and his final full-season numbers than on any single week in September. Song Sung-moon remains exactly what he was before this game: a rookie trying to find his footing in the majors, with more auditions almost certainly still ahead of him in the season’s final weeks.
What makes this particular night worth writing about isn’t that any one of these three performances was historically bad — hitless games happen constantly in a 162-game season, and no single 0-for-4 or 0-for-3 defines a player’s year. It’s the coincidence of timing: three of Korea’s most prominent MLB position players, at three very different stages of their careers and with three very different sets of stakes riding on the season’s final weeks, all went cold on the exact same night. For Korean baseball fans who have spent the year tracking all three storylines simultaneously, it was the kind of small, symmetrical bad night that’s easy to notice and impossible to fully explain — a reminder that even at the highest level of the sport, a cold stretch doesn’t check a calendar or a contract situation before it arrives.