The Los Angeles Dodgers closed out the Atlanta Braves 4-1 on Wednesday night at Truist Park, taking Game 4 of the National League Division Series and the best-of-five set 3-1 to clinch a third consecutive trip to the National League Championship Series. For Atlanta, the loss ended a season that had already survived one win-or-go-home game in the Wild Card round. But running underneath the pitching duel and the late-inning heroics was a smaller story that had followed this series from its opening pitch: the quiet, repeatedly postponed question of whether two players who share a Korean surname — and nothing else — would ever actually share a field in the same game. On the night the series ended, the answer arrived in the most Game 4 way possible: one of them finally got on the field, and the other watched the whole thing from the bench.
A Seventh-Inning Swing Decides It
For six innings, this game looked like it might turn into the low-scoring, tightly pitched affair both rosters had hinted at beforehand. Atlanta struck first in the bottom of the first, scratching out a run when outfielder Michael Harris II led off with a single, stole second base, advanced to third on a ground out, and came home on a wild pitch from Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow. Glasnow worked around trouble for the rest of his outing — he walked five batters in total and struck out five — but after that shaky opening frame, he didn’t allow Atlanta’s offense to break through again, stranding runner after runner as the game settled into a stalemate.
Braves starter Tyler Mahle matched him for most of the night. The right-hander, a Newport Beach, California native who grew up rooting for the very team he was now trying to eliminate, worked 6 1/3 innings and allowed just two runs — only one earned — keeping Atlanta in position to even the series. The game remained a 1-1 tie into the seventh inning, with both bullpens beginning to stir.
That’s when everything turned. With two outs and the bases loaded in the top of the seventh, Los Angeles outfielder Andy Pages worked the count full against Atlanta’s bullpen before delivering a two-run single up the middle, breaking the tie and giving the Dodgers a lead they would not relinquish. It was the kind of unglamorous, situational hit that decides postseason series far more often than the three-run homers that make the highlight reels — a professional at-bat against a tough reliever, in exactly the spot where a series hangs in the balance.
Los Angeles’ bullpen made sure the lead held. Tanner Scott worked a perfect eighth inning, and closer Edwin Diaz needed only three batters to finish off the ninth and seal the save. In between, Max Muncy added a solo home run in the top of the ninth, stretching the margin to the final 4-1 score and putting an exclamation point on a game that had, for six innings, looked nothing like a blowout.
Three-One, and On to Milwaukee
The series itself had been a genuine back-and-forth through four games — none of them decided by more than three runs, each one swinging the emotional momentum in a different direction. Los Angeles took Game 1, Atlanta answered to even the series in Game 2, the Dodgers regained control in Game 3, and Wednesday’s Game 4 finished the job. That kind of competitiveness made the final result feel earned rather than inevitable, even for a Dodgers team that entered the postseason as the two-time defending World Series champion.
With the series win, Los Angeles advances to the NLCS for the third consecutive year, a streak that places the organization among a small group of teams to reach their league’s championship round in three straight seasons during the era of expanded playoff formats — rarer still when two of those appearances came attached to parade-worthy Octobers. Their reward is a date with the Milwaukee Brewers, who closed out their own NLDS on the very same day, beating the San Diego Padres 3-1 in Game 4 at Petco Park to take that series by the same 3-1 margin. The two NL powers will meet in the Championship Series with a trip to the World Series on the line, a rematch of a familiar October pairing for Dodgers fans who have seen Milwaukee on the schedule before in deep postseason runs.
Two Players, One Surname, and a Matchup That Never Happened
For international viewers following this series for reasons beyond the standings, the more interesting subplot wrapped up in the bottom of the ninth inning — not with a hit, but with a substitution. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts sent Hyeseong Kim into the game as a defensive replacement at second base to open the final half-inning, giving the South Korean infielder his first appearance of the 2026 postseason. It was a brief, almost procedural moment in the context of a game the Dodgers had already all but wrapped up. But it closed the book on a storyline that had quietly run through all four games of this series: whether this NLDS would produce the first head-to-head postseason meeting in MLB history between two Korean-born players who happen to share the same surname in its English transliteration, even though their given names, family backgrounds, and career paths have nothing in common.
On the Atlanta side of that storyline was Ha-Seong Kim, the Braves’ starting shortstop, who had signed with the club as a free agent after several productive seasons with the San Diego Padres. His 2026 season had been compromised almost from the start: Kim underwent surgery on the middle finger of his right hand after slipping on ice during a stay in South Korea early in the year, an injury that cost him a chunk of the season and seemed to affect his timing at the plate even after his return. He started at shortstop in Games 1 and 3 of this series but was out of the lineup entirely for Games 2 and 4 — Wednesday’s benching marking the second time in four games that Atlanta’s manager opted for a different look in the infield. Some of that lineup shuffling traced back to Game 2, when right fielder Ronald Acuna Jr. tweaked his knee sliding into second base, forcing utility man Mauricio Dubon to bounce between the outfield and shortstop over the final two games of the series and squeezing Kim to the bench more often than Atlanta might otherwise have preferred.
Kim finished his 2026 postseason having gone hitless in five at-bats, with one run scored and an error charged to him in Game 3 — not the ending he or Atlanta’s front office had envisioned when he signed there as an everyday shortstop. With the Braves’ elimination, his season is now over, and the questions about his finger, his timing, and his adjustment to a new team will carry into the offseason. For a player who was expected to anchor Atlanta’s infield after years of steady defensive work in San Diego, an injury-interrupted first season in a new uniform, punctuated by a costly error in his team’s final series, is about as difficult a first impression as a new signing can make, however much of it traced back to bad luck on an icy sidewalk half a year earlier.
On the Dodgers’ side, Hyeseong Kim’s path to the field was almost the inverse story. Recalled from Triple-A and added to the postseason roster primarily as a speed threat off the bench, Kim did not appear in the Wild Card round or in the first three games of the NLDS, watching from the dugout as the series swung one way and then another without him. His pinch-running specialty — the exact skill set that got him on the roster in the first place — simply never came up in a game situation where the Dodgers needed a fast runner on base late. Wednesday’s ninth-inning defensive substitution, arriving only after the outcome was no longer in doubt, gave him his first taste of October baseball as a Dodger, even if the moment itself carried little competitive weight.
What makes the subplot worth noting at all is simply how close it came to resolving itself differently, and how completely it still didn’t. Across four games — Game 1 (Kim Ha-seong started, Kim Hye-seong did not play), Game 2 (neither player appeared), Game 3 (Kim Ha-seong returned to the lineup but committed an error; Kim Hye-seong again did not play), and Game 4 (Kim Ha-seong sat again; Kim Hye-seong entered in the ninth) — the two infielders were never once on the field at the same time. For fans who had been anticipating what would have been a genuine first in postseason history, the series ended with that particular door closed for good, at least for this October.
What a Third Straight NLCS Means for the Dodgers
Stepping back from the individual storylines, the bigger picture here is a Dodgers organization that continues to operate on a different timetable than the rest of the league. Entering October as the two-time defending World Series champion and now advancing to a third consecutive NLCS, Los Angeles has put itself in position to chase a run of sustained success that very few modern teams have managed, particularly in a playoff structure designed to inject more randomness into October than the old format did. Doing it while also handling late-series roster wrinkles — a banged-up opponent, a bench player getting his first look in October, a starting rotation piece in Glasnow working around traffic all night — is itself a small testament to the organizational depth that has carried the team through three straight long postseason runs.
Milwaukee will present a different kind of challenge than Atlanta did. The Brewers enter the NLCS having needed all four games to shake off a resilient Padres club, including a Game 2 comeback capped by a two-out, ninth-inning hit and a back-and-forth Game 3 that kept San Diego alive for one more day. That kind of grinding, come-from-behind identity suggests the NLCS will not be a laugher either, regardless of how the first three rounds of this postseason have gone for the two eventual participants.
Reading the Series Through the Numbers
Looking back at the four games as a set says almost as much about this series as any single highlight does. Los Angeles won Game 1 by a 5-3 score at Dodger Stadium, Atlanta answered with a 3-2 win in Game 2, the Dodgers took Game 3 by the same 3-1 margin they’d eventually repeat in the clincher, and Wednesday’s finale landed at 4-1. Add it up, and the Dodgers outscored the Braves by a combined total of just a handful of runs across the full series — a reminder that “won the series in four” and “dominated the series” are not always the same sentence, even when the final box score makes a team look comfortable in hindsight.
That competitiveness is part of why individual moments like Pages’ two-out, bases-loaded single carry so much weight. In a series this tight, a single at-bat in the seventh inning of Game 4 effectively decided which team’s season continued and which team’s ended, and it’s worth remembering that Pages worked a full count against a reliever before getting the pitch he turned into the go-ahead hit — the kind of patient, situational at-bat that rarely gets remembered the way a home run does, even when it matters just as much.
What Comes Next
For the Dodgers, the immediate focus shifts to preparation for Milwaukee, with the Championship Series expected to open in the coming days. For Atlanta, the offseason begins now, with a roster reassessment that will likely include a hard look at Ha-Seong Kim’s fit going forward after an injury-shortened, difficult first year in a Braves uniform. And for the two Kims whose parallel but disconnected paths defined one of this series’ quieter storylines, the ledger for 2026 is now final: one postseason at-bat column with zero hits and an error, one appearance log with a single defensive inning and no at-bats at all, and a shared surname that, for one more October, never got the matchup so many fans were hoping to see.