Lee Jung-hoo has spent three seasons in Major League Baseball answering a version of the same question, over and over: could the player who terrorized KBO pitching for years actually hit for power against the best arms in the world? On September 19, in the second inning of a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, he gave one of the clearest answers yet. Facing Dodgers ace Tyler Glasnow, Lee turned on a knuckle curve that dropped down the heart of the plate and drove it over the right-field fence for a solo home run — his 10th of the season, and the home run that pushed him into one of the smallest and most exclusive clubs a Korean-born hitter can join in the major leagues.
With 12 stolen bases already in the bank, Lee’s 10th homer completed a “10-10” season — double-digit home runs paired with double-digit stolen bases. It is a modest-sounding milestone by MLB’s own grandest standards, where 30-30 and 40-40 clubs get all the attention, but for a Korean-born position player, it is remarkably rare territory. Only two others have ever done it: Shin-Soo Choo, and Ha-Seong Kim, now with the Atlanta Braves. Lee Jung-hoo is the third.
A Slow Start, a Career-High Finish
To understand why this particular home run mattered, it helps to look back at where Lee started. He signed with the San Francisco Giants ahead of the 2024 season after years as one of the most feared contact hitters in the KBO, a player whose approach at the plate was built on discipline and bat-to-ball skill rather than raw power. His rookie MLB season reflected exactly that profile in the most literal sense: just 2 home runs, in a year interrupted by injury and the natural adjustment period every hitter faces moving to a new league, new pitching, and a new style of at-bat. Last season brought modest progress, with Lee finishing at 8 home runs — closer to double digits, but still short.
This season is different. Lee’s 10th home run on September 19 marked the first time in his three MLB seasons that he has reached double-digit home runs — and he did it with several weeks of the season still to play, meaning the number stands to climb further before the year is out. Through the games including September 19, Lee is hitting .274 with 146 hits in 532 at-bats, a batting average that places him comfortably as a everyday, above-replacement bat while the power number quietly ticks up alongside it.
The shape of that improvement says as much as the raw total. Going from 2 home runs to 8 to 10-plus across three seasons isn’t just a hitter getting lucky on a few extra fly balls — it reflects the kind of gradual physical and mechanical adjustment that takes years to show up in a box score, particularly for a player who built his reputation on a completely different offensive identity. Evaluators who worried in 2024 that Lee’s contact-oriented approach might cap his power upside in the majors now have three years of data suggesting the ceiling is higher than initially assumed.
The Pitcher He Did It Against Matters
Context matters enormously in moments like this, and the identity of the pitcher on the mound when Lee hit his milestone home run is not a small detail. Tyler Glasnow is one of the more electric and, at his best, dominant starters in the National League — a pitcher whose stuff, including a knuckle curveball that has given hitters across the league fits for years, isn’t the kind hitters typically square up cleanly. Lee caught Glasnow’s curve on a 2-2 count and didn’t just make contact; he drove it out to right field, the kind of swing decision and execution that suggests more than a mistake pitch got hit.
For American readers unfamiliar with Lee’s background, it’s worth pointing out what that kind of at-bat represents in miniature. This wasn’t a hitter simply picking up modest counting stats against replacement-level pitching late in a lopsided game. It came against a frontline starter, in a game where San Francisco was chasing a series outcome, in the middle of the batting order as the cleanup-spot right fielder. Lee started the game batting fourth, a lineup slot that signals real trust from his coaching staff, not a bottom-of-the-order placeholder.
What the 10-10 Club Actually Means
Baseball fans in the United States are conditioned to think about power-speed combinations in terms of 30-30 or the ultra-rare 40-40 club — the milestones reserved for the league’s most explosive athletes. A 10-10 season doesn’t carry that same headline weight inside MLB’s own record books. But measured against the specific population of Korean-born position players who have made the jump to the majors, the number tells a different story.
Only two Korean-born hitters had previously combined double-digit home runs with double-digit stolen bases in a single MLB season: Shin-Soo Choo, whose career remains the standard-bearer for Korean position players in the majors and who is also the only player from Korea ever to clear the far more demanding 20-20 threshold, and Ha-Seong Kim, whose glove-first reputation with the San Diego Padres and now the Atlanta Braves has been paired, in his best seasons, with exactly this kind of power-speed blend. Lee Jung-hoo’s arrival in that group means the list of Korean-born 10-10 hitters has grown from two names to three — a short list that has taken decades of Korean players reaching MLB to build.
That framing helps explain why a stat line that might look pedestrian by MLB’s biggest stars’ standards is being treated as a genuine milestone in Korean baseball coverage. It isn’t about Lee matching the league’s most explosive athletes. It’s about Lee matching the short list of players who share his specific origin story — evidence that the tools that made him one of the KBO’s best all-around hitters have translated, more completely than his early MLB numbers suggested, to the major leagues.
The Bigger Picture: San Francisco’s Season and Lee’s Role In It
The home run itself came in a game San Francisco ultimately lost, 2-8, with the Dodgers pulling away thanks in part to a four-home-run eighth inning that buried any hope of a Giants comeback. That result is worth noting honestly rather than glossing over — Lee’s milestone did not come attached to a signature team win, and San Francisco’s offense as a whole struggled to generate much else against a Dodgers pitching staff that, Glasnow’s rough patch against Lee aside, largely controlled the game.
But for a Giants team looking for building blocks heading into the following season, an everyday player developing new dimensions to his offensive game in real time is exactly the kind of individual growth that outlasts any single result. Lee has established himself as a fixture in San Francisco’s lineup, moving between outfield positions and hitting in the middle of the order, and the power growth on display this season adds a layer to his game that simply wasn’t part of the conversation about him in 2024.
Reading the Season Totals in Full
Put the full picture together and Lee Jung-hoo’s 2026 season reads as a genuine breakout by the specific metric of power production layered on top of an already-established hit tool. A .274 batting average with 146 hits across 532 at-bats is the profile of a durable, everyday contributor — the kind of player who is in the lineup often enough to accumulate those at-bats in the first place, which itself speaks to his coaching staff’s confidence in him after the interruptions of his rookie year. Add 10 home runs and 12 stolen bases on top of that foundation, and the season stops looking like simple continuity and starts looking like genuine development.
It’s worth being careful not to overstate what a single home run against a single pitcher proves about the rest of Lee’s season or his long-term trajectory. One swing off Glasnow’s curveball doesn’t rewrite the entire scouting report on a player, and San Francisco’s 2-8 loss is a reminder that individual milestones can occur inside team performances that fall well short of ideal. But the 10-10 milestone itself is not a single-game achievement — it is the product of a full season’s worth of at-bats, stolen base attempts, and swing decisions accumulating into a number that places Lee alongside just two other players in MLB history who share his specific path from Korean baseball to the major leagues.
Why This Milestone Resonates Beyond the Box Score
There’s a broader story here about how quickly perceptions of a player’s ceiling can shift. When Lee Jung-hoo signed with San Francisco, much of the pre-season analysis focused on whether his contact-first, gap-power approach would translate at all against major league velocity and secondary pitches, with home run totals treated as a secondary or even tertiary consideration next to his bat-to-ball skills and defensive value. Two home runs in his rookie season did little to challenge that framing. Three years later, a 10-homer, 12-steal season — his best power output yet, with weeks of the season still remaining — suggests the power question has been at least partially answered, even if nobody is projecting him as a 30-homer threat any time soon.
For Korean baseball fans specifically, milestones like this one carry an additional layer of significance tied to representation. Every Korean-born player who reaches a new statistical threshold in MLB — whether it’s Choo Shin-soo’s trailblazing 20-20 season, Ha-Seong Kim’s Gold Glove-caliber defense paired with real offensive pop, or now Lee Jung-hoo’s arrival in the 10-10 club — adds to a body of evidence that Korean baseball talent translates fully to the highest level of the sport, not just in isolated skills like contact hitting or defense, but across the complete offensive package that scouts and analysts use to evaluate star-caliber players.
Choo, Kim, and Lee: Three Different Paths to the Same Club
It’s worth spending a moment on what separates the three members of this club, because none of them arrived at a 10-10 season the same way. Shin-Soo Choo built his career as a true five-tool outfielder over more than a decade in the majors, and his 20-20 season remains the high-water mark for Korean-born power-speed production — a level none of his countrymen have matched since. Ha-Seong Kim, by contrast, made his name first as a defensive standout, an infielder whose glove earned him a starting job before his bat fully caught up, with his power-speed seasons arriving as his offensive game matured around an already-elite defensive foundation. Lee Jung-hoo’s route is different again: he arrived in the majors as arguably the most polished pure hitter of the three, a batting-average-first player from a KBO career built on rarely swinging and missing, with the power now catching up to an already-refined approach rather than the other way around.
That variety matters because it undercuts any single, simple narrative about what it takes for a Korean-born player to succeed offensively in MLB. There isn’t one blueprint — Choo’s all-around tools, Kim’s defense-first development, and now Lee’s contact-to-power progression all reached the same statistical marker by entirely different routes. For scouts and front offices evaluating the next wave of KBO talent eyeing a jump to the majors, that diversity of successful paths is arguably more useful information than any single case study could be on its own.
What Comes Next
With weeks still remaining in the 2026 season, Lee Jung-hoo’s counting stats are far from finished accumulating. A 10-10 season achieved with games still to play leaves open the possibility of an even more impressive final line — more home runs, more stolen bases, and potentially a batting average that continues to climb from its current .274 mark. Whether Lee approaches a number like 15 home runs, or continues adding to his stolen base total at a similar pace, the rest of September and any remaining October baseball will determine just how far this breakout power season ultimately goes.
What’s already clear, regardless of how the final numbers shake out, is that Lee Jung-hoo has answered the specific question that followed him out of Korea and into his first two MLB seasons. The power was there all along, even if it took three years of major league at-bats — against pitchers like Tyler Glasnow, on pitches like a well-located knuckle curve — for it to show up consistently on the scoreboard. Joining Shin-Soo Choo and Ha-Seong Kim in the 10-10 club isn’t the loudest milestone in the sport this September, but for a player whose entire profile was built on contact and instincts rather than raw power, it may be the number that best captures how much his game has grown since he first stepped into a major league batter’s box.