There is a particular kind of baseball player who spends most of a season on the edges of the box score — a pinch runner here, a defensive replacement there, a batting average that never quite climbs out of the basement — and then, on one specific night when the standings actually depend on it, becomes the entire story. On September 11 at Truist Park, that player was Ha-seong Kim. He entered the game as a pinch runner in the bottom of the ninth inning with Atlanta trailing. Two innings later, he had delivered the hit that tied the game and scored the run that won it, and his own manager was calling it the two biggest swings of Atlanta’s season.
The Braves beat the Philadelphia Phillies 6-5 in 11 innings in what both ESPN and Yahoo Sports described as a key early game in a pivotal NL East series between the division’s top two teams. By the time it ended, Atlanta had pushed its division lead over Philadelphia out to five games, and Kim — a player hitting .135 for the season before that night — had turned in a performance built entirely out of the kind of situational contributions that box scores tend to undersell and standings tend to remember.
Down 2-3, and a pinch runner is called for
The Braves entered the bottom of the ninth trailing the Phillies 2-3. Needing to manufacture a run to extend the game, Atlanta turned to Ha-seong Kim as a pinch runner. It is a low-glamour role by definition — the kind of substitution that exists purely to add speed on the bases in a moment where every extra half-step matters, with no expectation of coming to the plate at all that inning. Atlanta got what it needed: the Braves tied the game to force extra innings, setting up a back-and-forth that would stretch two extra frames before it was settled.
That kind of role is, in a sense, the story of Kim’s season. A player once counted on as an everyday contributor around the infield, he has spent large stretches of this year in a more marginal role, used for his legs and his glove on nights when his bat has not been cooperating. A .135 batting average, entering the night’s action, tells that story bluntly. It is the kind of number that gets a player’s playing time questioned, not celebrated — which is exactly what made what happened next so notable.
Extra innings: Philadelphia strikes first
Under the extra-innings format now standard across Major League Baseball, both teams began each additional frame with a runner already placed on second base — the so-called automatic runner rule designed to increase the odds of a game-ending result and shorten marathon contests. In the top of the 11th, Philadelphia made use of that setup. Luis Arraez delivered a single that drove in the automatic runner, pushing the Phillies back in front, 5-4, and putting Atlanta on the brink of a series-opening loss in front of its home crowd.
For a team that had entered the night five games clear of Philadelphia in the loss column, dropping the opener of a head-to-head series against the club chasing it in the standings would have been a real setback — not fatal, with three weeks left in the regular season, but the kind of result that tightens a race rather than settles it. Atlanta needed an answer in the bottom of the inning, and manager Walt Weiss needed it from whoever was due up, regardless of what their season batting line looked like.
The at-bat: Kim ties it with two outs
With two outs in the bottom of the 11th and a runner on second base in the form of Ozzie Albies, Ha-seong Kim stepped in against Philadelphia reliever Brooks Raley. Two outs already recorded meant there was no margin for a fly ball to the wrong spot or a routine ground ball; Atlanta needed a hit, cleanly, to keep the game alive. Kim delivered it, lining a single to left field that scored Albies from second and tied the game at 5-5.
It is worth sitting with the mechanics of that at-bat for a moment, because it is precisely the kind of situation that separates a player’s raw numbers from his actual value to a team on a given night. A .135 hitter facing a two-out, do-or-die at-bat against a left-handed reliever in the 11th inning of a game his team’s season-long division lead was riding on is, statistically, an underdog in that matchup. Kim came through anyway. Whatever his batting average said about his season as a whole, it said nothing about what he was capable of in that specific at-bat, at that specific moment, and that gap between the two is a large part of why baseball people talk about “clutch” performances even when the broader numbers argue against predicting them.
The walk-off: Baldwin drives Kim home
Tying the game did not end Kim’s night. He remained at first base after his single — Albies having already crossed the plate — and the very next batter, catcher Drake Baldwin, delivered a double to center field. Kim, running from first with two outs already on the board and every incentive to be moving on contact, raced around the bases and scored the winning run, sealing Atlanta’s 6-5 victory in walk-off fashion.
That sequence — Kim’s game-tying single immediately followed by his own game-winning run, scored on a teammate’s extra-base hit one batter later — is what elevated the night from a solid situational contribution into the kind of performance a manager singles out publicly. It was not just a clutch at-bat; it was a clutch at-bat and a heads-up piece of baserunning stitched together within the same half-inning, with Kim as the connecting thread through both plays.
What the manager said
Braves manager Walt Weiss did not undersell what he had just watched. Speaking to reporters after the game, Weiss said Kim had delivered two of the most important hits of Atlanta’s season in its late stages, and added that Kim had “definitely earned the trust” of his teammates. For a player who has spent much of the year in a reduced role, with a batting average that would ordinarily be a source of quiet concern inside a clubhouse, that kind of public endorsement from a manager carries weight. It is not a comment about tools or projection; it is a comment about what a specific player did in a specific high-leverage spot, delivered by the person who decides how much he plays going forward.
That trust matters in practical terms too. Teams pushing for a division title in September do not have the luxury of carrying players purely for potential — every roster spot and every substitution decision gets scrutinized against what a team actually needs to win games in front of it. A manager publicly crediting a bench player with the two biggest hits of the season is, in effect, a statement of continued confidence heading into the stretch run, regardless of what the season-long batting line shows.
The numbers, before and after
The specifics of Kim’s statistical line underline just how far this performance was from what his season had looked like up to that point. Before the game, he was hitting .126. After going 1-for-1 at the plate — the single that tied the game — his average rose to .135, on 14 hits in 104 at-bats, with his RBI total climbing to nine for the season. Those are not numbers that would typically be associated with a player being singled out by his manager as delivering the two most important hits of a team’s year. They are, instead, numbers that make clear exactly how deep an offensive slump Kim has been fighting through in 2026 — and how much heavier this particular hit weighed simply because of how rarely his bat has come through this season.
It is also worth placing this game in the context of the night before it. According to reporting from Money Today, Kim had started the previous game at shortstop, batting ninth, and gone 2-for-3 with two RBI as Atlanta snapped a three-game losing streak. Two straight nights of meaningful contributions — one as a starter, one as a pinch runner turned tying-run producer — suggest a player who may be finding some rhythm at exactly the moment his team needs it, even if the cumulative batting average has not yet caught up to reflect it.
The standings: a five-game cushion
Beyond the individual drama, the result carried real standings weight. Atlanta improved to 87-61 with the win, while Philadelphia fell to 82-66, stretching the Braves’ lead in the National League East to five games. ESPN and Yahoo Sports both flagged the game as the opener of a series billed as pivotal for the direction of the division race down the stretch. A Philadelphia win would have trimmed that margin and injected fresh urgency into the season’s final weeks; instead, Atlanta walked away with a result that both extended its cushion and delivered exactly the kind of emotional, extra-innings win that can carry a clubhouse’s momentum into the following night’s game.
For a Braves team with its sights set on both a division title and playoff positioning, wins like this one do double duty. They add a game to the standings ledger, and they also produce the kind of moment — a struggling bench player coming through twice in the same half-inning — that teams often point back to later in October when asked what turned a good season into a deep postseason run.
A season of shifting roles
Understanding why this particular night resonated as much as it did requires understanding the shape of Kim’s season up to this point. He arrived in Atlanta with a track record as a steady, versatile infielder, the kind of player a lineup can pencil in every day without much second-guessing. This year has not followed that script. A batting average that sat at .126 before the Phillies series is not a slump in the ordinary sense of the word — it is a full season’s worth of struggle at the plate, the sort of number that would push most everyday players toward part-time duty or a trip to the minor leagues for a reset.
Instead, Kim has remained on Atlanta’s active roster deep into September, increasingly deployed in the situational roles that a struggling bat can still fill: a pinch runner when speed is at a premium, a late-inning defensive option, an occasional starter when the matchup or the schedule calls for it. That the Braves have continued to carry him through a pennant race, rather than moving on to another option, says something about what the coaching staff still believes he offers even when the batting average does not reflect it. September 11 was the clearest possible vindication of that decision, compressed into a single half-inning.
Why the automatic-runner rule made the ninth-inning substitution matter
It is worth explaining, for readers less familiar with the extra-innings format now used across Major League Baseball, exactly why a manager would burn a roster spot on a pinch runner in a tie-or-lose situation in the ninth inning rather than simply letting the inning play out with the batter already on base. Under the rule, every extra inning beginning with the tenth starts with a runner already placed on second base specifically to manufacture scoring chances and shorten games that might otherwise stretch past midnight. But the ninth inning itself, when a team is trailing and needs to score to survive, still requires runners to reach base the traditional way — a walk, a hit, an error — and then advance around the bases on their own speed and situational awareness.
That is the exact situation Atlanta faced: trailing by a run in the bottom of the ninth, with baserunners who needed every available advantage to score from what was likely a routine single or a fielder’s choice. Inserting Kim purely for his legs, with no plan for him to bat in that frame, was a small tactical decision that only became a story because of what followed two innings later — a reminder that in a close, extra-innings game, a manager’s marginal decisions in the middle innings can end up mattering as much as the swings that finish it.
What comes next
The Braves and Phillies were still in the early stages of what both organizations, and the outlets covering them, described as a pivotal series, with more head-to-head games to follow. For Atlanta, protecting a five-game division lead with three weeks left in the season means continuing to win series against the team chasing it, and manager Walt Weiss now has fresh, public evidence that Ha-seong Kim — whatever his overall batting line says — is a player capable of coming through when the moment is largest. Whether that translates into expanded playing time down the stretch, or simply reinforced trust in exactly the situational role he filled on September 11, is a decision that will play out over the Braves’ remaining schedule. For one night in Atlanta, at least, the numbers on the scoreboard mattered far more than the ones next to his name in the box score.