Hyeseong Kim’s entire 2026 postseason, to this point, consists of one half-inning. He trotted out to second base as a defensive substitute in the bottom of the ninth of NLDS Game 4 against the Atlanta Braves, with the Dodgers already leading 4-1 and the series in hand. He did not get a plate appearance. Now, with the Dodgers preparing for a National League Championship Series rematch against the Milwaukee Brewers, that single defensive cameo is at the center of a roster debate that could determine whether Kim plays another inning this October at all.
According to multiple reports citing the Associated Press, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts is weighing whether to carry 13 pitchers on the NLCS roster instead of the 12 the team used for the division series. Major League Baseball’s postseason roster is capped at 26 players, so adding a pitcher means subtracting a position player. Several Korean outlets, including Newspim, Sportsworld, Mydaily, SPOTV News, Topstar News and iSports, have reported the same core detail in the days leading up to the series: if the Dodgers do carry a 13th pitcher, Kim is widely seen as the most likely position player to lose his spot.
A Role Defined by What He Hasn’t Done
The case against keeping Kim on the roster is built almost entirely around usage, not performance in any traditional sense — he simply hasn’t been given the opportunities to accumulate much of either. Through four NLDS games against Atlanta, his only appearance came in the ninth inning of the series-clinching Game 4, when he entered as a defensive replacement at second base with the outcome essentially decided. He did not start a game. He did not pinch-run. He did not come to the plate. For a roster spot that, in October, usually needs to justify itself through speed off the bench, late-inning defense, or a left-handed bat to counter a tough reliever, one inning of mop-up defense is a thin résumé to point to when a team is deciding whether it needs an extra arm instead.
That thinness is precisely why the pitcher-versus-position-player math lands on Kim first. Roberts has other position players who started games, logged at-bats, or filled pinch-running duty more frequently during the division series, which makes them harder to remove without a more complicated roster shuffle. Kim, by comparison, is the player whose postseason could be swapped out without disrupting anything else the Dodgers have been doing on the field. It’s an uncomfortable position for any player to be in, but it is especially uncomfortable for one who signed with the organization specifically to carve out a bigger role than a defensive-replacement cameo.
The Veteran Whose Health Could Decide Everything
The swing factor in this particular roster calculation isn’t really about Kim at all — it’s about Miguel Rojas, the Dodgers’ veteran utility infielder. Rojas injured his hip and lower back diving for a ball on defense during NLDS Game 3 against Atlanta and did not play in Game 4, raising real questions about his availability for the NLCS. If Rojas can’t go, the Dodgers would need a backup infielder on the roster regardless of the pitcher math, which would likely preserve a spot for Kim. If Rojas is healthy enough to play, the calculus flips, and Kim becomes significantly more expendable in a 13-pitcher alignment.
That dependency on another player’s hip and back has turned what might otherwise be a straightforward roster decision into something closer to a waiting game. Asked directly about Kim’s chances when reporters raised the subject, Roberts confirmed that Kim remains a real subject of internal discussion and spoke positively about his versatility — his ability to switch-hit, pinch-run, and cover multiple infield and outfield positions — without committing to a final answer. The Dodgers are not expected to lock in their NLCS roster until shortly before Game 1, which leaves Kim, and the reporters tracking his situation, parsing injury updates on a 36-year-old utility man as the clearest signal of what’s coming.
The Mechanics Behind the Math
The roster rule itself is simple, even if the decision it forces is not. Major League Baseball fixes postseason rosters at 26 players for every round, with no exceptions for a deep bullpen or a banged-up bench. A team can reshuffle that 26 between rounds — swapping an injured player for a healthy one, for instance — but it cannot simply carry 27 or 28 bodies because the matchup calls for it. If the Dodgers decide a seven-game series against a 103-win Brewers lineup calls for a 13th arm in the bullpen, that pitcher has to come from somewhere, and the only place to find him is by cutting a position player who is already on the roster. That is the entire mechanism driving Kim’s situation: not a judgment on his talent, but a zero-sum roster slot that pits his defensive versatility against the marginal value of one more reliever in a series that could stretch to seven games.
Why This Kind of Roster Drama Will Feel Familiar
For American sports fans unfamiliar with the specifics of Kim’s situation, the broader shape of this story is a familiar one: it’s a roster-bubble drama, the kind that shows up in every sport once a postseason roster has to be trimmed to its final, highest-value configuration. A player who spent the regular season bouncing between the majors and Triple-A, whose job in October is to deliver short, situational bursts of value — a stolen base here, a clean defensive inning there — is exactly the type of player who gets squeezed when a team decides it needs another arm in the bullpen instead. It happens in the NFL with practice-squad call-ups on game day, in the NBA with the back of a playoff rotation, and in baseball every October when front offices decide whether a 13th pitcher is worth more than a bench bat nobody has used yet.
What raises the stakes here is the caliber of team making the decision. The Dodgers are the two-time defending World Series champions, chasing a third consecutive NLCS appearance after dispatching the Braves in four games. This is an organization that has won it all each of the last two years and is built to maximize every marginal roster advantage in pursuit of a third straight title. That a team with championship depth to spare is still treating its 26th roster spot as a genuine question — one that hinges on a 36-year-old infielder’s hip — says something about how precisely postseason rosters get optimized at the highest level of the sport.
A Season That Never Settled Into a Steady Role
Kim’s roster uncertainty heading into the NLCS is less a sudden development than the continuation of a pattern that defined his entire 2026 season. He spent a significant stretch of the year at Triple-A Oklahoma City after being optioned down in late May, and didn’t return to the Dodgers’ active roster until September 28 — just in time to be added to the postseason roster. In the major league time he did see this season, he appeared in 43 games, batting .259 with one home run, 11 RBIs and five stolen bases: a modest, part-time contributor’s line, consistent with a player who never fully locked down an everyday job at any point in the year.
That track record of limited, start-and-stop usage is the backdrop against which the current roster debate is playing out. It isn’t that Kim performed poorly when given chances — the sample size simply never grew large enough, during the regular season or now in the postseason, for him to build a case that’s hard to argue against. One defensive substitution with the game already decided doesn’t change that equation, and it’s part of why reports treat his roster spot as being in genuine jeopardy rather than a near-certainty either way.
What’s at Stake for Korean Representation in October
There’s also a broader context worth noting for anyone following Korean players in this postseason specifically. Kim Ha-seong, the Atlanta Braves shortstop who shares a nearly identical name but is a different player, saw his own season end when the Braves were eliminated by the Dodgers in that same NLDS, finishing the series 0-for-5. With Atlanta’s season over, Hyeseong Kim’s roster spot — contested as it is — represents the only path for a Korean-born player to appear in this year’s NLCS at all. If the Dodgers go with 13 pitchers and Kim is the position player removed, it would mean zero Korean players taking the field in this particular round of the postseason, a detail that Korean sports media has tracked closely given how rare it’s become to have multiple Korean position players reach the same October stage in the same year.
That attention reflects how recent the current wave of Korean position players in October baseball actually is. For years, Korean representation in the MLB postseason leaned heavily on pitching, and it is only in the last several seasons that multiple Korean-born infielders have reached deep playoff rounds in the same year at all. Kim Ha-seong’s rise with San Diego and then Atlanta, running in parallel with Hyeseong Kim’s arrival in the Dodgers organization, briefly raised the possibility of two players sharing a surname facing off in the same series — a storyline that never actually materialized on the field across the four NLDS games between their teams, since the two were never active in the lineup at the same time. Now, with Atlanta eliminated, that storyline has fully closed, and the only remaining question is whether Hyeseong Kim himself gets another chance to extend it.
The Schedule Bearing Down on a Decision
None of this uncertainty can drag on much longer. The NLCS follows the standard 2-3-2 format: Games 1 and 2 are scheduled for October 11 and 12 at American Family Field in Milwaukee, with Games 3 and 4 shifting to Dodger Stadium on October 14 and 15. If necessary, Game 5 would be played in Los Angeles on October 16, followed by Games 6 and 7 back in Milwaukee on October 18 and 19. The Brewers secured home-field advantage by winning a franchise-record 103 games, finishing three games ahead of the Dodgers in the standings during the regular season — a reminder that despite the Dodgers’ back-to-back titles, Milwaukee enters this series as the team with the better regular-season résumé. Both clubs are expected to finalize and announce their NLCS rosters shortly before Game 1, which means Kim’s fate, one way or the other, will be public knowledge within days.
It’s also a rematch with history attached. The Dodgers swept the Brewers in last year’s NLCS on their way to a second consecutive World Series title, which adds an extra layer of familiarity — and perhaps motivation for Milwaukee — heading into this year’s series. For the Dodgers, the roster-construction question surrounding Kim is a small piece of a much larger operation aimed at a third straight championship. For Kim personally, it’s considerably more direct: the difference between extending a postseason that has so far amounted to one half-inning, or watching the NLCS and a possible World Series run from outside the 26-man roster entirely.
A Decision Still to Come
As of now, nothing is finalized. Roberts has acknowledged the pitcher-count question is real and has spoken about Kim’s versatility without ruling him in or out, and the Dodgers have not announced their NLCS roster. Rojas’s recovery timeline remains the detail most likely to tip the decision one way or the other, and reporters covering the team are watching his participation in NLCS workouts as closely as anything else this week. For a player whose season already took him from the major leagues to Triple-A and back, and whose postseason so far has lasted all of one defensive substitution, the next roster announcement will settle a question that has quietly shadowed his entire year: whether there’s still a place for him on this Dodgers roster when it matters most.