Less than 24 hours after the Los Angeles Dodgers left South Korean infielder Hyeseong Kim off their National League Championship Series roster in favor of an extra left-handed reliever, the pitching staff that move was supposed to reinforce got torched anyway. The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Dodgers 7-4 in NLCS Game 2 at American Family Field, taking a 2-0 series lead behind a three-RBI night from catcher William Contreras and an early knockout punch to Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who didn’t survive the third inning.
The result leaves the two-time defending World Series champions in a position they have not occupied often in recent Octobers: down two games in a best-of-seven series, having been outplayed in both ends of the equation that is supposed to define their roster-building philosophy — pitching depth and timely hitting — in the very two games where the club chose to lean on exactly that depth over a bench bat.
A Short, Rough Outing for an Ace
Yamamoto, who has been treated as the Dodgers’ most dependable postseason arm in past Octobers, lasted just 2⅔ innings. The outing unraveled in the third, when he loaded the bases with two outs and then surrendered a go-ahead two-run single to Christian Yelich. By the time manager Dave Roberts came to get him, Yamamoto’s final line read four hits allowed, two walks, one strikeout, and three earned runs on 75 pitches — a dramatically early exit for a pitcher the Dodgers have repeatedly turned to in big spots.
Korean coverage of the game leaned hard into the contrast between the plan and the result. One outlet’s headline translated roughly to “even the king of October has fallen,” framing Yamamoto’s short outing as the latest example of a Dodgers postseason pitching plan buckling under pressure. Another Korean report went further, characterizing Roberts’ roster construction — the decision to carry an extra reliever in place of Kim — as a strategic misstep now that the extra pitching hasn’t stabilized anything.
Contreras Answers, Then Delivers Again
Milwaukee’s offense did its part to turn Yamamoto’s early trouble into a series-defining result. Contreras tied the game at 4-4 with a solo home run off reliever Chris Bubic in the fifth inning, then factored into the decisive scoring that pushed the Brewers’ lead to the eventual 7-4 final. Between the home run and his other RBI production, Contreras finished the night with three runs batted in, the kind of complete offensive performance that turns a tight, back-and-forth game into a series-defining laugher by the later innings.
For Milwaukee, which finished the regular season with a Major League-best 103 wins, the result builds on a Game 1 victory that was itself a tight, low-scoring affair — the Brewers won the series opener 2-1 behind a Brice Turang home run and a go-ahead single from Luis Lara. Stringing together a tense 2-1 opener and a comeback-driven 7-4 Game 2 gives Milwaukee a complete toolkit heading into the next three games: they’ve shown they can win a pitcher’s duel and a slugfest in the same series.
The Decision That Set the Stage: Why Kim Isn’t on This Roster
To understand why Korean media is framing this result through Kim’s absence, it helps to revisit the roster decision itself. Ahead of Game 1, the Dodgers released their 26-man NLCS roster and left Kim off it entirely, adding left-handed pitcher Justin Wrobleski in his place. The club’s stated reasoning centered on the format difference between rounds: the NL Division Series the Dodgers had just won over the Atlanta Braves is capped at five games, while the Championship Series can run as long as seven, and the club wanted the extra bullpen arm to cover the additional workload that a longer series could demand.
Kim’s exclusion was not exactly a shock by the time it was made official. Multiple American outlets had predicted it in the days after the Division Series wrapped, reasoning that a lightly used bench infielder was a more expendable roster spot than an extra reliever heading into a potential seven-game set against a deep Brewers lineup. When the actual roster was announced, The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, who covers the Dodgers beat closely, confirmed in his own reporting that Kim’s name was indeed absent, matching what had already been forecast.
There was also a variable working against Kim that had nothing to do with his own performance: veteran infielder Miguel Rojas, who had been dealing with a hip and lower-back issue that put his own postseason availability in question. For a stretch, there was a real scenario in which a Rojas injury could have opened a roster spot that Kim might have filled. Instead, Rojas recovered in time to be included on the NLCS roster, closing the door on what had been Kim’s one realistic path onto the active 26.
One Half-Inning, and Little Else, All October
Kim’s postseason football — or in this case, baseball — has been remarkably thin even before the roster cut was made official. Across the entirety of the Dodgers’ NLDS win over the Braves, Kim appeared in exactly one game, entering as a defensive substitute at second base in the ninth inning of a series-clinching Game 4. He did not record a plate appearance in the series. That is the full extent of his October on the field: one defensive substitution, one half-inning, zero at-bats, before the roster cut arrived and removed even the possibility of more.
It is a strikingly small sample for a player the Dodgers paid millions of dollars to bring over from Korea. But it also reflects where Kim sat on the organizational depth chart by the time the postseason arrived — a player who had fought his way back onto the active roster late in the regular season, rather than a locked-in everyday contributor the club was building its lineup around.
A Regular Season That Went From Promising to Rocky and Back
Kim’s 2026 regular season tells the story of why the Dodgers were comfortable moving on from him for this particular round. He didn’t make the Opening Day roster, but an injury to Mookie Betts opened a path to the majors. Once there, Kim started encouragingly: in April, he hit .296 with 16 hits in 54 at-bats, a solid showing that suggested he might carve out a real role. May told a different story. His average dropped to .226 over 62 at-bats that month, and on May 30, the Dodgers optioned him back to Triple-A Oklahoma City.
Manager Dave Roberts was specific about what had gone wrong, telling reporters that Kim’s swing had changed — citing reduced lower-body drive and a rise in swing-and-miss rate as the mechanical issues that needed correcting. The club framed the demotion not as a final judgment but as a recalibration, a chance for Kim to rebuild his timing away from the day-to-day grind of a big-league schedule. Infielder Santiago Espinal, who had been designated for assignment earlier in the year, was brought back to fill the roster spot Kim vacated.
Kim eventually worked his way back to the majors later in the season and did enough to land a spot on the postseason roster to begin with — itself no small feat for a player who had been sent down mid-season. His final regular-season line: a .259 average across 43 games, with 30 hits, one home run, 11 RBI, and an OPS of .651. Those numbers describe a bench-caliber contributor rather than an everyday building block, which lines up with how sparingly the Dodgers have used him once October baseball started.
The Posting Process That Brought Him to Los Angeles
None of this unfolded the way it looked like it would when Kim first arrived in Major League Baseball. He was posted by his original KBO League club, the Kiwoom Heroes, with the posting period opening at noon Eastern time on December 4, 2024 (early morning of December 5 in Korea). Teams had roughly a month-long negotiating window, and on January 4, 2025, Kim agreed to terms with the Dodgers: a contract structured as three guaranteed years plus two team option years, worth up to $22 million in total. The guaranteed portion of the deal covered $12.5 million over the first three seasons, with a team option worth an additional $9.5 million over the following two years if the Dodgers chose to exercise it. Kiwoom, for its part, collected a posting fee reported at up to roughly $4.2 million (about 5.8 billion won) for making one of its top infielders available to MLB clubs.
Kim had other suitors — reporting at the time indicated the Los Angeles Angels were in the mix — but he has said publicly that he chose the Dodgers specifically because of the organization’s history with Korean players, name-checking Chan Ho Park and Hyun-Jin Ryu as players he grew up watching and admiring. For a KBO infielder who had established himself as one of the league’s premier players in Korea, landing with the Dodgers wasn’t just a career opportunity; it was, by his own account, something closer to a childhood ambition realized.
Why This Pitching-Over-Bat Tradeoff Is Now Under Scrutiny
The Dodgers’ stated reasoning — that a potential seven-game series calls for a different roster shape than a five-game one — is a real and common pattern in MLB postseason strategy, not a convenient excuse. A Division Series capped at five games limits how many times a manager has to turn over his bullpen; a Championship Series that can stretch to seven games means more total innings, more back-to-back appearances for relievers, and a higher chance that a thin bullpen gets exposed over the course of a long series. Adding a second left-handed reliever in Wrobleski gave Roberts another matchup option against a Brewers lineup that was going to see extended at-bats from the same hitters over multiple games, rather than the quicker look a five-game series allows.
Two games into the series, though, that depth has not been the difference-maker it was built to be. It was Yamamoto, the staff’s highest-profile starter, who got knocked out early in Game 2 — not a bullpen arm running out of gas in extra innings. That has left Korean commentary pointed: the Dodgers subtracted a bench bat to add pitching insurance, and the pitching that actually broke down in Game 2 was the front-line starter the extra reliever was never going to replace anyway. Whether that makes the original roster call wrong, or simply irrelevant to how Game 2 actually unfolded, is the subject of the second-guessing now surrounding the series.
Two Very Different Ways to Lose, Back to Back
Part of what makes this 0-2 hole feel especially discouraging for the Dodgers is the variety of ways Milwaukee has found to win. Game 1 was a tight, low-scoring affair decided by a handful of swings — a solo home run from Brice Turang and a go-ahead single from Luis Lara were enough to hold up behind a strong Brewers pitching performance, with the Dodgers managing only one run themselves. That’s the profile of a game that can read as a fluke, a case of a few big swings landing on the right side of the ledger in an otherwise even contest between two 100-win-caliber rosters.
Game 2 erased any temptation to read it that way. This time, Milwaukee’s offense did the heavy lifting from the start, chasing Yamamoto before he could finish the third inning and then piling on with Contreras’s homer and RBI production to turn a competitive game into a comfortable 7-4 final. A team that can win a nail-biter one night and a slugfest the next is, by definition, not relying on one single formula — and that versatility is exactly the kind of trait that tends to worry an opposing dugout three games still away from elimination.
What Comes Next
The series shifts to Dodger Stadium for Game 3, with Los Angeles needing to find answers fast against a Milwaukee team that has now won in two very different ways — a tight pitcher’s duel in Game 1 and a comeback-fueled offensive outburst in Game 2. For Kim, the next meaningful opportunity to contribute would come either through a potential World Series roster reset or a midseries injury replacement — both scenarios entirely outside his control. In the meantime, his 2026 season stands as a case study in how quickly fortunes can shift for even well-compensated international signees: a promising April, a mechanically troubled May, a corrective assignment to Triple-A, a late-season recall, a razor-thin postseason cameo, and now a roster cut that Korean media is already linking to the two losses that have put the two-time defending champions in a 0-2 hole they did not expect to dig for themselves this October.