Seven categories, one summer

On 14 August 2010, Lee Dae-ho homered in his ninth consecutive game. The previous record was eight, shared by Ken Griffey Jr., Don Mattingly and Dale Long — three major leaguers, across nearly sixty years, and nobody had got past it. A first baseman in Busan did.

That season he led the KBO in seven offensive categories: batting average, home runs, runs batted in, runs scored, hits, on-base percentage and slugging. The final line was 127 games, 552 plate appearances, .364/.444/.667, 44 home runs and 133 runs batted in.

Listing the numbers does not tell you how big the season was. Forty-four home runs means one thing in a league where everybody is hitting and something else entirely in a league where nobody is. So the question this piece asks is narrower and more answerable: measured against the league he actually played in, how far above it did he stand?

The 2010 KBO was eight clubs scoring 4.98 runs a game, with a league on-base percentage of .351. In that environment Lee's wOBA was .494 and his wRC+ 208 — first in wOBA among the 35 qualified hitters, which is to say he produced 108 percent more runs per plate appearance than a league-average hitter.

He generated 75.7 runs more than an average bat would have. That is roughly what a whole club scores in ten days.

The interesting part is not the power. It is that the power arrived without the usual bill. He struck out in 13.9% of his plate appearances and walked in 11.1% of them. Hitters who slug forty-four home runs generally pay for it in swings and misses; Lee did not. What makes 2010 unusual is not that he was the strongest man in the league — it is that he was simultaneously among its hardest to strike out.

Set it beside the present. The 2026 KBO scores 5.08 runs a game against a league on-base percentage of .347 — a livelier league than the one Lee was hitting in. The same .364 is not worth the same amount in the two seasons, and wRC+ is precisely the number that remains once that difference has been divided out.

He left for Japan in 2012 — four years with Orix and SoftBank, then a season with the Seattle Mariners in 2016 — and came home to Lotte in 2017. His last professional game was on 8 October 2022. The KBO career reads .309, 374 home runs, 1,425 runs batted in. In all of it the Giants never won a Korean Series. The club's last title came in 1992, when he was ten.

So 2010 stays in Busan's memory as a year without a trophy. What it left instead was a measurement: one season in which a single hitter showed exactly how far above an entire league a person can stand, with the receipts still on file. The numbers have not moved.

Every figure above is recomputed from the 2010 record book against that season's own league totals — wOBA scaled to a .351 league on-base percentage, wRC+ against 5.0 runs a game. No park factor is applied, in this era or any other.