Jung Hoo Lee's MRI results were encouraging, but highlight Giants' precarious postseason hopes

New York Times

19-03-2025

An MRI of Jung Hoo Lee's back did not show structural damage, according to a statement by the Giants on Tuesday. They're hoping he can play before the weekend. The expected 26-man roster, lineup, rotation and bullpen arrangement is still mostly intact for Opening Day, with the exception of presumptive backup catcher Tom Murphy, who is out indefinitely.
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The letters 'MRI' sent Giants fans into a mini-panic that could have evolved into a major panic, but all is well. For now. Nobody touch anything.
Lee's back issues highlight something underneath the surface for the 2025 Giants. Maybe you've felt it, but you couldn't quite put your finger on it. Maybe it's as obvious to you as where Sean Hjelle is during Opening Day introductions. It goes something like this, though: There are about a half-dozen players in the lineup who make you think, 'If this guy goes down, the Giants are hosed.' There are about 27 or 28 other teams in baseball that feel the same way about several of their players, but think of the Giants' postseason hopes like a particularly rickety Jenga tower. If Lee's back were more seriously injured, that would have been a wiggly block pulled from one of the lowest levels of the tower.
It's all blocks at the lowest levels at this point. It's not like the Giants don't have extra outfielders in the event of an emergency. Grant McCray could replace Lee's speed and defense if needed, and there's a chance Wade Meckler could replace some of the bat-on-ball skills. The Giants are hoping Luis Matos is polished and well-rounded enough to make a contribution wherever they need him to. So the fear of a more serious Lee injury wasn't that they were going to be completely unprepared. It's not like they would have needed to do something ridiculous and doomed to fail, like claiming a light-hitting first baseman on waivers and making him an outfielder for the first time in his life.
But when you're constructing a path to the postseason for the Giants, you're doing it under the assumption that the expected contributors will contribute. You can run all the ZiPS projections for every team 18 times a day until the season starts, but one pitch, dive, swing or, in Lee's case, mattress, can change it all. Again, not unique to the Giants. It's not as if the Yankees' postseason odds held steady when they lost Gerrit Cole for the season. Their odds went down, especially considering they play in one of the most competitive divisions in baseball.
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The Yankees still have strong postseason aspirations, though. They have slightly shaken but sturdy postseason hopes, even after losing Cole. It's not as if the Giants would have gone into rebuilding mode with worse MRI results for Lee, but if you're thinking that they have a shot at the postseason, you're probably optimistic about what Lee can add to a lineup that needs all the help it can get. If the last front office was right about his talent and ceiling, the Giants have a shot.
If he's not around, the Jenga tower starts to wobble, and that's true for a lot of players in the lineup, even more so than usual. I won't name names because baseball players are a superstitious lot, but that projected lineup needs to stay as close to the actual lineup as possible, for as long as possible. You can make the argument that Matos would be a capable replacement for Lee's expected production, and I won't stop you. Except Matos doing anything of note is also one of the blocks in that Jenga tower. It's a little higher up from the foundation, but it's still there. A path to the postseason would be so much easier with Matos thriving in a jack-of-all-outfielders role, picking up starts for Mike Yastrzemski against lefties and roaming the other spots in the outfield when someone else needs a day off.
Things change quickly in baseball, especially when necessity is the mother of substitution. The Giants were counting on Thairo Estrada last season, and when he forgot how to tell a ball from a strike, they had to pivot. An indirect downstream effect of Estrada's disappointing season was that Tyler Fitzgerald got at-bats and had a season strong enough to win a starting job this year. When Austin Slater got hurt, Heliot Ramos took his role and expanded on it. So it's possible for a crisis to turn into an opportunity.
The happy accidents might eventually be a part of the 2025 Giants' story, but there's a limited supply of happy accidents that you can reasonably hope for. One is fine. Two is pushing it. Three is starting to get into science-fiction territory. More than that, and you're basically saying things like, 'If Barry Bonds signs a mid-season contract and hits 20 homers as the DH, the Giants might be fine.' They could claim Shohei Ohtani on waivers. It wouldn't be against the physical laws of the universe, so …
You know the Giants will need a lemons-into-lemonade story, but hoping for one before the season actually starts is too much. That's why the news of Lee's MRI was so scary. The bad news is coming, and it's coming for every team at some point, but the Giants' postseason hopes are relying on them forestalling theirs for as long as possible. March is way too soon.
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When Lee crashed into the center field wall last year, ending his season, the Giants already didn't look like a postseason contender. They'd go slightly over .500 for the rest of the season, but the Lee injury was when that wobbly Jenga tower crashed down. He was just starting to look comfortable and string hits together, and while the injury wasn't the reason the Giants finished nine games out of postseason position, it was the final sign that the team wasn't likely to hit the six-player parlay they were going to need to play in October.
They didn't need that sort of feeling in March. You certainly didn't need it. But if you're wondering why a March MRI for a player with a career .641 OPS felt so ominous, here's why. There are only so many blows the Giants can absorb this season. They don't need to start taking them right now.