Peppered between professionally edited highlights of San Francisco Giants outfielder Jung Hoo Lee deftly stealing second base or smashing a home run in Yankees Stadium are alternative takes — highlight reels that not only celebrate what he does on the field but how he looks while doing it.
Ask any Giants fan and it’s no surprise that Lee’s rise to fame has hit this stage. After five Golden Gloves, two batting titles and an MVP in six seasons with the Nexen/Kiwoom Heroes of South Korea’s KBO League, the excitement among San Francisco sports fans was immediate as he introduced himself as the “Grandson of the Wind.” The nickname is a nod to his pro baseball pedigree, as his dad Lee Jong-beom — whose resume includes a KBO MVP in 1994 and four championships — was known as the “Son of the Wind.” Lee has carried on his father’s legacy with his athletic prowess, earning him respect from traditional baseball fans and even spawning multiple fan groups. But it’s his personality that has earned him love from outside the sports world.
Scroll past the relatively manicured “Day in the Life at Spring Training” video starring Lee that the official Giants TikTok account posted — complete with a player voiceover and dedicated camera operator — and you’ll immediately be confronted with a 180,000-view video dedicated to Lee’s face card. This one features quick cuts of Lee’s most photogenic on-field portraits, and short slow-motion clips of the outfielder smiling, celebrating or simply moving his head set to “Boyfriend” by Ariana Grande.
There’s no hidden messaging to unpack here. This video is made to show how hot Lee looks in a baseball uniform.
It’s also clearly influenced by the fan edit culture of Korean pop music fans, just with a dash of classic fan-made YouTube sports highlight reel mixed in. There is a through line from how the most popular celebrities from Lee’s home country are revered on social media to how his athletic talent, and physical aesthetic, are celebrated online. In turn, this provides a different way for women and some LGBT fans to engage with the traditionally masculine cultural product of American baseball.
While the concept of a fan edit is not a phenomenon unique to the musical genre — an American “Star Trek” fan is credited with creating the first one in 1975 — its prevalence in K-pop standom is impossible to ignore.
“That kind of thing is very common to see in the K-pop industry, and some K-pop fans are really good at editing the images and videos and creating a new type of music videos,” Wonseok Lee, a Yale postdoctoral associate specializing in Korean popular culture, told SFGATE. “Fan participation is crucial in understanding K-pop.”
A cursory search of “fancam” on YouTube brings up videos focusing on one member of a band. Those clips are then compiled into a fan edit where the viewer is drawn to mesmerizing dance moves and sultry expressions, occasionally put in slow motion, but always set to an appropriate song, ranging from dramatic to cutesy. Some are more explicitly thirsty than others, such as this one featuring lead rapper Felix from the group Stray Kids — at over 162,000 views, it’s only the fifth-most-watched video on this user’s profile.
The Stray Kids editor had a lot more footage to pull from, but there’s clearly visual overlap between what the K-pop stan did and what many of the other Lee stans have done. After all, while the adoring eyes of K-pop stans often drive the views for these edits of their favorite idols, they also showcase the actual physical talent of these performers — whether a swim-move slide into second is as sexy as a body roll with six-pack abs is in the eyes of the beholder.
Of course, there are differences between what K-pop fans make for their idols and what some fans are making for the Giants star. While this particular style of sports fan edit culture is in its nascent stages, K-pop had decades to evolve into the subculture that exists today. Wonseok Lee remembers video fan edits first began to proliferate in the early 2000s as the second generation of K-pop groups began to emerge, focusing heavily on the dance choreography of individual members.
“That kind of fan-edited product has existed for a long time in the K-pop industry, but the quality has evolved a lot,” Lee said. “I had an interview with a fan organization and I was very surprised that they have specific roles like executive editors. They are super organized.”
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Even so, there are inextricable links between sports fans and K-pop fans. Take the fan chant, for instance, something Lee says is a staple of K-pop fan practices: It’s a designated moment of a song where fans at a concert are expected to sing. There are clear parallels between that and baseball fandom in Japan and Korea, where fans chant songs about their favorite player — which, in turn, is influenced by European football chants.
As K-pop has exploded in popularity in the United States, it was only a matter of time before the fan culture bled into the sports world, a major piece of the American entertainment zeitgeist. Some of those ways have been fun and surprising, such as a subgenre of social media posts that break down sports news in “K-pop terms.” Others have been more clear cut, like when groups touring the United States wear local sports jerseys. In a May 28 concert at Oracle Park, Stray Kids singer Seungmin wore a J.H. Lee jersey while performing, and called it “a great honor” to be at the same stadium the Giants player competes in.
K-pop fan culture does more than influence these videos; it also provides an evolutionary road map to where this form of sports fandom could grow in the future.
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So what could that look like? In K-pop, there are also fans who dedicate themselves to filming “iso cams,” focusing on a single member of a group throughout a concert, and those clips are in turn folded into fan edits. There’s signs that things are headed that direction for Lee, as a YouTube account purely dedicated to his at-bats already exists. Korean entertainment agencies will sometimes work with K-pop fans who create the highest quality edits to help promote their groups, creating a less hierarchical dynamic, as Yale’s Lee describes, meaning there’s perhaps a world where teams could eventually find social media talent through posters that find their star players to be dreamy.
Obviously, what will truly keep the Giants outfielder in the big leagues is the talent he’s displayed in eight years as a professional baseball player. However, one thing that could take him over the top as a household name, particularly on a franchise with a long history of those, is the way he’s seen and celebrated on his way to stardom. He’s unquestionably become the star attraction during Giants home games — look no further than the crowd pop during his homer on Korean Heritage Night — but these videos could make that the case from well beyond any ballpark in the world.