The Los Angeles Dodgers moved to the brink of a third consecutive National League Championship Series appearance on Tuesday night, beating the Atlanta Braves 3-1 at Truist Park behind another dominant postseason start from Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The win put the two-time defending World Series champions up two games to one in the best-of-five National League Division Series, meaning a single victory in Game 4 — scheduled for the same ballpark — would send Los Angeles back to the NLCS for the third straight year. For Atlanta, the loss means a season that has already survived one do-or-die elimination game, in the Wild Card Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, is now one defeat away from being over. And running through all three games of this series has been a quieter storyline that still has not resolved itself: the long-awaited, still-unrealized matchup between two Korean-born players who share a surname and, for one night at least, swapped which of them actually played.
Yamamoto Does It Again
Yamamoto was the story of the night on the mound. The Dodgers’ right-hander worked seven innings, allowing just four hits and a single walk while striking out ten Atlanta hitters, and left the game having surrendered only one earned run. It was the latest in a string of postseason performances that have made Yamamoto one of the most trusted big-game starters in the sport since he arrived in Major League Baseball from Japan’s Orix Buffaloes, and it came against a Braves lineup that has otherwise hit well enough this October to push the series to a third game in the first place.
Atlanta’s starter, left-hander Chris Sale, did not match him. Sale lasted five innings and allowed three earned runs on seven hits, taking the loss in a game that, for stretches, looked like it might turn into the kind of back-and-forth slugfest Game 2 had been two nights earlier. Instead, Yamamoto’s control of the strike zone and the Dodgers’ early offense took the drama out of the middle innings, even if Atlanta’s bullpen and lineup kept the final margin from ballooning into a blowout.
A Three-Run Fourth Inning Settles Things Early
The game’s decisive swings came in the top of the fourth inning. Andy Pages reached base on a single to lead off the frame, and Enrique Hernandez followed by driving a two-run home run down the left-field line, giving Los Angeles an early 2-0 cushion. Hernandez’s homer was immediately followed by another one off the bat of Freddie Freeman, a solo shot that marked the 18th home run of Freeman’s postseason career — a number that places him among the most prolific October home-run hitters of his generation, built up across stops with the Atlanta Braves, the Dodgers, and a run of deep playoff appearances with both organizations.
That burst of power gave Los Angeles a 3-0 lead before the Braves had managed a single run, and it proved to be more than enough support for Yamamoto, who did not allow a run of his own until the bottom of the fifth. Atlanta’s answer, when it came, was modest: Mauricio Dubon reached base on a single, and Drake Baldwin followed with a groundout to first base that drove Dubon home for Atlanta’s only run of the night. It was, in context, a near-miraculously limited response to the kind of start Yamamoto was otherwise throwing, and it left the Braves chasing a two-run deficit for the rest of the game without ever mounting another serious threat against the Dodgers’ pitching staff.
Why the Format Matters Right Now
For readers newer to how Major League Baseball’s postseason is structured, the division series is played in a best-of-five format using a 2-2-1 arrangement of home games: the team with home-field advantage — in this case the Dodgers, as the higher seed — hosts the first two games, the series shifts to the opponent’s park for games three and four, and a decisive fifth game, if necessary, returns to the home of the higher seed. That structure is why Tuesday’s game was played at Atlanta’s Truist Park despite the Dodgers holding home-field advantage in the series overall, and it’s why Wednesday’s Game 4 is scheduled for the same Atlanta ballpark rather than a neutral or alternating site.
The stakes of that scheduling quirk are straightforward but significant: if the Dodgers win Game 4, the series ends immediately, on the road, and Los Angeles advances to the NLCS for the third year in a row without needing to play a fifth game at all. If Atlanta wins instead, the series resets to a single decisive Game 5 back at Dodger Stadium, with everything on the line for both clubs. There is no margin left for Atlanta beyond that; a loss in Game 4 ends the season outright, while a loss in Game 5 would do the same. For the Dodgers, every additional win now is a step toward a franchise that has already won back-to-back titles chasing a third straight trip to the final four.
The Korean Derby That Still Hasn’t Happened
Running underneath the pitching duel and the home runs has been a subplot that has quietly carried through all three games of this series: the question of whether this NLDS would produce Major League Baseball postseason history’s first-ever head-to-head matchup between two Korean-born players sharing the same surname, Ha-Seong Kim of the Braves and Hyeseong Kim of the Dodgers. The two men are not related, their names are rendered identically in English despite representing different Korean given names, and until this series, neither had ever shared a postseason field with the other.
In Game 1, Ha-Seong Kim started at shortstop and reached base once, drawing a walk in addition to playing strong defense, while Hyeseong Kim did not appear at all. In Game 2, the matchup came even closer to not happening altogether: both players sat out entirely, marking the first time in the series that neither Kim factored into the game in any capacity. Entering Game 3, there was reason to think the pattern might finally break — and in one sense, it did. Ha-Seong Kim was back in Atlanta’s starting lineup, batting ninth and manning shortstop for the first time since Game 1. But the development that actually defined his night wasn’t an at-bat; it was a glove. Kim was charged with an error after failing to cleanly field a ball hit into the shortstop hole by Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez, a defensive miscue that, while it didn’t single-handedly decide the final score, added to a difficult stretch in a series where Atlanta has had very little room for mistakes.
Meanwhile, on the Dodgers’ side, Hyeseong Kim once again did not appear anywhere in the starting lineup Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts sent out for Game 3, which featured Mookie Betts at shortstop, Freeman at first base, Teoscar Hernandez in left field, Will Smith behind the plate, Shohei Ohtani at designated hitter, Miguel Rojas at second base, Pages in center field, Kyle Tucker in right field, and Enrique Hernandez at third base. No reporting out of the game indicated Hyeseong Kim entered later as a substitute or pinch-runner, extending his streak of non-involvement in this series to all three games played so far. Late in September, before the Dodgers’ postseason roster was finalized, Roberts had indicated that Hyeseong Kim was among the players under consideration specifically for a pinch-running role given his speed on the bases — a role he filled sparingly during the Dodgers’ championship run the previous October. Whether that usage materializes in Game 4 or a potential Game 5 remains to be seen; nothing from either club since the roster was set has confirmed a specific plan for deploying him in this series.
The result is a storyline still waiting for its moment three games in: the two Kims have now combined to share a single field in exactly zero of the first three games of this series, despite representing what would be a genuine first for Korean baseball fans following the sport from overseas. It is a reminder of how incidental postseason roster decisions — lineup construction, matchup-based benching, and bullpen-day strategy — can quietly keep even a highly anticipated matchup from ever actually occurring, no matter how many games a series goes.
It’s worth understanding why Atlanta has been willing to sit Ha-Seong Kim at all, given that he is an established everyday shortstop rather than a bench piece. Kim moved to the Braves as a free agent ahead of this season after several years as a regular with the San Diego Padres, and while his glove work has remained a consistent asset, his bat went through a prolonged stretch of struggle in the second half of the year. That slump is the backdrop for why Atlanta’s coaching staff has, at times this postseason, preferred alternatives like Mauricio Dubon in the lineup against certain pitching matchups rather than running Kim out every single day regardless of opponent — a fairly ordinary piece of October roster management that happens to have an unusually large side effect on a storyline international fans have been following closely.
What a Deep Dodgers Run Looks Like From the Outside
For an American audience less familiar with how deep the Dodgers’ recent run has been, some context helps frame just how unusual a third straight NLCS appearance would be. Los Angeles enters this series as the back-to-back defending World Series champion, a distinction that, combined with a trip to this year’s NLCS, would put the organization in rare company: very few teams in the modern era of expanded playoffs have advanced to the league championship round in three consecutive seasons, let alone done so while also winning the World Series in two of those years. Yamamoto’s continued dominance on the mound — and his growing reputation as a pitcher opposing lineups simply cannot solve in October, following his status as the most valuable player of the previous year’s World Series — is a central reason why that kind of sustained run has looked sustainable rather than lucky.
Atlanta, for its part, is not a stranger to this stage either, having already fought through a win-or-go-home Wild Card Series against Philadelphia just to reach this NLDS. That history matters context-wise: a Braves roster that has already proven it can perform under single-elimination pressure once this postseason now has to do it again, immediately, against a team that has given them almost no room for error through the first three games combined.
A Series That Has Swung Every Game
One detail that has been easy to lose inside the individual game stories is how little separation there has actually been between these two teams through three games. The Dodgers took Game 1 by a 5-3 score at home. The Braves answered in Game 2, winning 3-2 in a game that turned into what amounted to a bullpen battle after Los Angeles starter Blake Snell was pulled early. Game 3 swung back the other way, but even at 3-1, it was a one-swing game for much of its middle innings before Atlanta’s offense went quiet against Yamamoto. None of the three games has been decided by more than two runs, which is part of why neither side has been able to fully pull away, and why a series that looked like it might be over quickly after Game 1 is instead heading into a fourth game that could end it just as easily as it could extend it to a fifth.
What Comes Next
Game 4 is set for Wednesday at Truist Park, with the Dodgers needing just one more win to close out the series and advance, and the Braves needing a win simply to keep their season alive for one more game. Should Atlanta force the series to a fifth and deciding game, the series would shift back to Dodger Stadium, putting the Dodgers in the position of needing to win on their own field rather than Atlanta’s to finish the job. Either way, the next twenty-four hours will determine whether the all-Korean matchup fans have been waiting for gets one more chance to happen in this series — or whether it becomes a storyline carried over into whatever comes next for both players, in whatever October still lies ahead.