San Francisco Giants’ Jung Hoo Lee catches a fly ball against San Diego Padres’ Jackson Merrill in the fifth inning at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Calif., on Saturday, April 6, 2024. SAN FRANCISCO — Add roaming the majors’ most difficult outfield to the list of cultural, lingual and baseball adjustments Jung Hoo Lee is facing in his transition from Korea to the major leagues.
“I just told him, ‘Man, there’s nothing you can do. We’ve all lost the ball in the sun. We’ve all had that situation. Guess what, it’s going to happen again. There’s not really anything you can do,'” Yastrzemski said. “The only thing I said is to keep your head up and try figure out a way to maybe get a read on a ball before it gets to the sun so that you can hopefully be somewhere near it.”
Although Sunday’s series finale against the Padres marked only Lee’s third game at Oracle Park, he has already began to learn some of its other intricacies.“No flag is ever blowing the right direction that the wind is actually blowing,” added Yastrzemski, who has logged thousands of innings in the outfield here since 2019, finishing as a runner-up for a Gold Glove in right field in 2021, and has even more wisdom to instill in the rookie covering the ground to his right.