Fifty-six
Lee Seung-yuop hit 56 home runs in 2003, an Asian record that stood for a decade. The interesting question is not the number — it is how far outside his own league he had to stand to get it.
By Yunho Lee · 8 min read · figures computed from KBO records
2003 · 131 G
The line
| PA | 596 | AB | 479 |
| H | 144 | 2B | 23 |
| HR | 56 | RBI | 144 |
| R | 115 | BB | 101 |
| SO | 89 | HBP | 10 |
| AVG | .301 | OBP | .428 |
| SLG | .699 | OPS | 1.127 |
| ISO | .399 | BABIP | .259 |
| wOBA | .482 | wRC+ | 211 |
| wRAA | +79.5 | WAR | 8.93 |
Against his own league
Percentile among 34 qualified hitters
2003 league
.345 wOBA · 4.64 R/G
2026 league
.347 wOBA · 5.08 R/G
In 2003 Lee Seung-yuop hit 56 home runs. It was an Asian single-season record, and it held for a decade — until Wladimir Balentien passed it in 2013. Lee was twenty-six.
A count on its own does not settle anything. 56 in 596 plate appearances works out to one every 10.6 times he came to the plate. The full line: 131 games, .301/.428/.699, 144 runs batted in.
The 2003 KBO scored 4.64 runs a game, with a league on-base percentage of .345 and a league slugging of .414. Against that, Lee's wOBA was .482 and his wRC+ 211 — 111 percent more runs per plate appearance than a league-average hitter produced.
An isolated power of .399. The distance between him and the league is not in the batting average; it is entirely in that one line.
Isolated power is slugging minus batting average — extra bases per at-bat, with the singles taken out. Lee's was .399 in 2003 against a league mark of .145. Batting average would tell you he was a very good hitter. This tells you he was a different kind of hitter from everyone else on the field.
He left after that season: two years with Chiba Lotte, five with the Yomiuri Giants, one with Orix. He returned to Samsung in 2012 and played through 2017, hitting two home runs in his retirement game. His 467 career KBO home runs are still the most anyone has hit.
The 2026 KBO scores 5.08 runs a game — a higher-scoring league than the one he did it in. Fifty-six home runs today and fifty-six in 2003 are therefore not the same achievement, and wRC+ is the number left standing once that has been accounted for. On that basis the season is still enormous.
Which is the more interesting question anyway. Not how many, but how far — how far outside his own league a hitter had to stand to get there. The answer is in the table above, and for ten years nobody closed the gap.
Every figure above is recomputed from the 2003 record book against that season's own league totals — wOBA scaled to a .345 league on-base percentage, wRC+ against 4.6 runs a game. No park factor is applied, in this era or any other.