Woo Joo Jeong Is Skating the River

A key part of developing as a baseball analyst is knowing one’s own scouting blind spots. So here’s one of mine: I will go absolutely berserk for any prospect who shows even a hint of life against older competition in international play. I can’t help myself.

Brett Lawrie makes the Canadian Olympic team just out of high school in 2008, and plays regularly in the tournament. (This tournament featured lights-out pitching by 21-year-old Hyun Jin Ryu and 20-year-old Stephen Strasburg, the latter the only college player on Team USA.) Lawrie then plays for Canada again in the 2009 WBC, before making his professional debut.

Also on Team Canada in 2009: 20-year-old Single-A right-hander Phillippe Aumont comes into a jam with the bases loaded and nobody out against Team USA, and blows up David Wright, Kevin Youkilis, and Curtis Granderson in succession.

In 2017, Jorge Alfaro, 23 years old and with all of six games of major league experience, hits a tape measure home run off Fernando Rodney of the Dominican Republic to force extra innings.

(My distaste for the zombie runner rule has its origins in this contest, which ended 10-3 after Alfaro’s overmatched Colombia squad ran out of pitchers.)

You might or might not remember what happened to these guys. Lawrie had a monster third of a rookie year at age 21, and while he was mostly pretty decent in six otherwise musclebound big league seasons, he was out of baseball by 27. Aumont and his diabolical knuckle-cure made the big leagues; in fact, I was excited to be in the park for his major league debut, but his career did not last long for reasons best illustrated by his 7.0 career BB/9 ratio.

And while Alfaro has carved out a solid career — I was going to proverbial bat for him as recently as January 2023 — I expected more from this unusually gifted athlete than the life of a well-coiffed backup catcher.

Why do I keep making this mistake? Why will I keep making it?

Two reasons: First, I love international sports. World Baseball Classic, Olympics, World Cup, world junior hockey tournament, Six Nations rugby… you put a flag on it and I’ll watch it. I think golf is a moral abomination, and when I’m President we will return every country club in the union to pristine wilderness. Even so, I’ll go out of my way to watch the Ryder Cup.

Second, I have a well-founded belief in the utility of testing young athletes against older competition. Sometimes you get that in college, or in the minors, but the uneven nature of international competition offers an unusual density of such confrontations.

International baseball is fairly mature; it became a medal sport at the Olympics in 1992, and the World Baseball Classic has been around for 20 years now as something approaching the best-on-best tournaments that define international soccer, basketball, hockey, and rugby.

Is it completely mature, in that there’s a vast variety of different winners, and a fairly level playing field among competitors? Not really, but I don’t know that that’s true of any international sport apart from men’s soccer.

In five WBCs, we’ve had three different winners and a total of nine different countries in the semifinal round. When the Dominican Republic failed to get out of the group stage in 2023, it was a huge deal in the local press, perhaps comparable to the soul-searching that would accompany an early exit by Brazil in the FIFA World Cup.

Nevertheless, there are wide variations in quality among the 20 WBC teams. Even within those teams. Do you want to know how many of the 20 rosters are made up entirely of MLB players?

Zero.

That’s a little misleading; the best Japanese and Korean players don’t always come over here, and the difference between a major leaguer and a minor leaguer is fleeting. Today’s New York Yankee is tomorrow’s Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRider.

So how about this: What percentage of each team’s roster comprises of players currently under contract with a team in MLB, NPB, the KBO, or its minor league affiliates? Only two countries, South Korea and Japan, are currently batting 1.000 on that count.

Feel free to nitpick that criterion; there are absolutely teams in the CPBL, or the Mexican League, or American indy ball, that face a higher level of competition than some A-ball or rookie league teams in the affiliated minors. I don’t know what the league adjustment is for a player on Neptunus, the big powerhouse team in the Honkbal Hoofdklasse, vs. Bethune-Cookman, which got a player onto the Dutch roster.

And there are edge cases; the one non-MLB player on Team USA is Clayton Kershaw, who’s bound for retirement but also pitched in the World Series four months ago. He might be a glorified mascot on this squad, but even the old junkballer version of Kershaw is better than most countries’ aces.

The point I’m trying to make is that for a lot of countries, the WBC is kind of a Mystery, Alaska situation. You know, the movie about an Alaskan pond hockey team that takes on the New York Rangers. (For my money, Burt Reynolds’ best sports film but only the second-best movie of the 1990s with Ron Eldard and Mary McCormack in prominent supporting roles. I recognize this is might be a minority opinion; Deep Impact was polarizing.)

At the end of the movie, the Rangers beat the Mystery team, but it’s close, and two of the hometown players get signed to professional contracts. One is a ready-made NHL-quality player who’s been stuck working at a grocery store; the other is an unpolished but swift-footed teenager named Stevie Weeks, whose callowness is illustrated in a memorable scene involving a snowplow.

Underdog WBC teams have a similar composition: a few legit pros, backed up by a bunch of guys with real jobs. Even Canada — a reasonably big baseball country — had to call on Aumont again. An up-and-down guy at his peak, Aumont is now 37, and has been farming vegetables in Gatineau since 2020. If he delivers a shutdown inning against Team USA this time around, it’ll be a much bigger story than it was in 2009.

What I’m interested in are the potential Stevie Weekses. Here’s another example from 2023: Harry Ford had just turned 20 and had zero experience above Low-A. But because he played on a Great Britain team that was light on recognizable names, even a back-end-of-the-Top 100 prospect, some two and a half years from his major league debut, started regularly, hit in the middle of the lineup, and became a breakout star.

Is Konnor Griffin good enough to do that right now? Absolutely. But ultimately, the ceiling for him is an MVP-type shortstop. And Team USA has two of those in Bobby Witt Jr. and Gunnar Henderson, and has left Trea Turner, Dansby Swanson, Mookie Betts, and CJ Abrams home. I could go on, but you get the point. Griffin is so far down the pecking order he’d need to find a Czech passport under his pillow in order to even think about the WBC now. The same goes for Moisés Ballesteros and Venezuela, or Leo De Vries and the Dominican Republic.

Even some prospects from lesser baseball powers have been left home. (Panama apparently has too much catching depth to take Eduardo Tait, to my disappointment.) That leaves our pool of potential Stevie Weekses rather shallow. At the start of the tournament this week, there will only be four teenagers out of some 600 rostered players, and only 16 players under the age of 21.

This is a fun table, because in learning about the youngest players in the WBC, I’ve been able to discover what trendy 2000s baby names were like in Dutch. There are Braydens and Bellas in every language.

Most of these guys are either going to be end-of-bench options, like Lawrie on Team Canada, or they’re going to end up framing their WBC jersey in their office as a fun conversation piece while they’re selling insurance or practicing probate law. Surely, Aumont is not the only player who’ll leave this tournament and go back to rotating his turnips.

I’ll highlight two exceptions from this list: One is Wei-En Lin, who’s gotten a lot of coverage here recently. David Laurila wrote about him twice in late 2025, once in a Sunday Notes column titled, “Wei-En Lin and Jo Hsi Hsu Will Be Taiwan’s WBC Pitchers to Watch.” And sure enough, it came to be. Lin also made Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski, and James Fegan’s watchlist for the 2027 Top 100 Prospects list, as a promising lefty with good fastball command who’s a breaking ball away from future mid-rotation status.

The other pitcher from this list I have an eye on is Woo Joo Jeong of South Korea. Jeong just turned 19 in November. In 2025, at just 18 years old, he made 51 appearances for Hanwha of the KBO, mostly out of the bullpen on a team that included Ryu and Cody Ponce. Jeong posted a 2.85 ERA and struck out 82 batters in 53 2/3 innings.

I’m trying not to get too over my skis here, having learned my lesson in the Phillippe Aumont Incident of 2009, but Jeong is four months younger than Seth Hernandez, the first high school pitcher selected in last year’s draft. And while Hernandez was playing, you know, high school ball, Jeong was finishing second in the KBO in strikeout rate, among pitchers with 50 or more innings.

Jeong is my early pick, but it’s too early to tell for sure who will be the Stevie Weeks of this tournament. Last time around, a Czech electrician struck out Shohei Ohtani during pool play; surely something like that will happen again and I’ll get googly-eyed over a player we’ll never hear from again. The magic of international sports is based largely in the emergence of unlikely heroes, be they part-timers or, in some cases, actual children.