Kim Do-young still leads the KBO League in home runs. He has 40 of them, more than anyone else in Korean professional baseball this season, and no one has actually caught him. But for roughly two weeks now, he also hasn’t been allowed to add to that total — not because of a slump, and not because pitchers have started avoiding him, but because his own baseball schedule stopped counting toward it. First a fractured nose sidelined him, then a national team call-up pulled him out of the KBO entirely. While Kim Do-young trains with South Korea’s Asian Games squad in Seoul and prepares to fly to Japan, the players chasing him have kept playing — and one of them, a 32-year-old former Colorado Rockies and Atlanta Braves outfielder named Sam Hilliard, has used the opening to make the KBO’s home run race genuinely competitive again.
It is a story that says as much about how national-team obligations reshape a pennant race as it does about any single player’s hot streak. And it is playing out alongside a nearly identical dynamic in the KBO’s wins column, where a Doosan Bears pitcher who shared the league lead has been pulled away at the exact moment his closest rival stayed put.
Four Home Runs in Five Games
Hilliard’s surge became impossible to ignore on September 15, when he hit his 35th and 36th home runs of the season in back-to-back at-bats during a KT Wiz win over the Hanwha Eagles in Daejeon. Those two swings were part of a five-game stretch in which Hilliard hit four home runs total, the kind of hot streak that, on its own, would be a notable footnote in most KBO seasons. In the context of September’s home run race, it was something more: with Kim Do-young’s total frozen at 40 and LG Twins slugger Austin Dean sitting at 39, Hilliard’s surge closed the gap to four home runs and three home runs, respectively — turning what had looked like a two-man race between Kim and Dean back into a legitimate three-way contest with three weeks left in the season.
For American readers, Hilliard’s name may actually ring a bell in a way most KBO imports’ names do not. He spent parts of seven major league seasons with the Colorado Rockies and, briefly, the Atlanta Braves, appearing in 332 career MLB games with a .218 batting average, 44 home runs, and 26 stolen bases — a useful, versatile outfielder who never quite locked down an everyday role in the big leagues. In Korea this season, he has been something closer to a star: entering mid-September play, Hilliard carried a batting average near .300 to go with his power numbers, production that would have made him one of the more productive outfielders in MLB had he posted it there instead.
How Kim Do-young’s Total Got Frozen at 40
The mechanics behind Kim Do-young’s frozen home run count are straightforward, even if the timing is dramatic. On September 9, in a home game against the NC Dinos, Kim attempted a bunt that came off his bat awkwardly and struck him in the face, fracturing his nasal bone and sending him into surgery. He returned to the KIA Tigers lineup just four days later, on September 13, and delivered one of the signature individual games of the KBO season — going 3-for-4 with three RBIs and, in the process, becoming the youngest player in KBO history to reach 40 home runs, 100 RBIs, and 100 runs scored in the same season.
That comeback proved Kim was fully healthy. It did not, however, buy him any more time in a KIA uniform. On September 14, the day after that milestone game, Kim reported to South Korea’s Asian Games training camp at Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome, beginning a stretch that will keep him away from KIA’s regular-season schedule through the team’s departure for Nagoya, Japan on September 18 and the tournament itself, which runs through September 27. Whatever home runs Kim hits in Asian Games competition will not count toward his KBO season total. For the purposes of the KBO home run title, Kim Do-young has effectively been placed on an involuntary, ten-day-plus injured list — except the reason isn’t an injury at all, it’s a mandatory national team obligation tied to a tournament that offers players a military service exemption if Korea wins gold.
A KBO Quirk With No Real MLB Equivalent
It’s worth pausing on why this situation doesn’t really have a parallel in American professional sports. MLB players who make an All-Star team miss, at most, a few exhibition-adjacent days around a midseason break that doesn’t affect the regular-season schedule at all. Players who join Team USA or another country for the World Baseball Classic do so in spring training, before the counting stats that decide batting titles and home run crowns have even started accumulating. There is no real American equivalent of a mid-September stretch in which a league’s best offensive player is pulled out of playoff-race games for a week and a half by a mandatory national-team commitment, while every counting statistic that decides an individual title keeps running for everyone else.
That is precisely the situation the Asian Games creates for the KBO every four years for the players called up to it, and September’s timing makes the effect especially pointed: the tournament lands squarely in the stretch run of the KBO regular season, at the exact moment individual titles are usually decided. A player like Kim Do-young does not lose his existing home run total by going to represent his country — but he does lose every additional opportunity to extend it for as long as the tournament keeps him away, while his competitors in Korea keep playing meaningful KBO games every day.
The Same Dynamic, Playing Out in the Wins Race
Home runs are not the only counting stat being reshaped by Asian Games absences this September. Entering play on September 13, Doosan Bears right-hander Choi Min-seok and LG Twins starter Lim Chan-gyu were tied for the KBO lead in pitcher wins at 14 apiece, with Choi picking up a win against the NC Dinos and Lim doing the same against the Samsung Lions that same day — a genuine head-to-head deadlock at the top of the leaderboard. The very next day, Choi Min-seok reported to the Asian Games pitching staff alongside Kwak Bin and So Hyeong-jun, a call-up that, assuming a normal once-a-week starting rotation, is expected to cost him roughly two KBO starts he otherwise would have made.
Lim Chan-gyu, by contrast, remains with the LG Twins for the rest of the stretch run, free to add to his win total in every turn through the rotation while his co-leader is unavailable. For a pitcher chasing a wins title, missing two starts in the final three weeks of a season is not a minor inconvenience — it’s close to a full turn of the calendar with zero opportunity to add to the number that decides the race. Lim, for his part, has downplayed the significance of the opening this creates, saying he has “no real interest” in chasing a wins title and that pitching toward a personal statistic “changes the essence” of why he takes the mound. Whether or not he means to capitalize on it, the arithmetic of the situation does the capitalizing regardless: every start Lim makes while Choi is in Japan is a start in which the gap can only move in Lim’s favor.
KT’s Bigger Picture: A Team Built Around Its Replacement-Level Depth
Hilliard’s surge has also come attached to team success, which is part of why it has drawn extra attention inside Korea. His September 15 two-homer game came in a KT Wiz win that extended the club’s winning streak to seven games, with veteran right-hander Ko Young-pyo turning in six scoreless innings on four hits and eight strikeouts to pick up his 12th win of the season in the same outing — moving Ko into sole possession of third place in the KBO’s separate pitcher wins race, one rung below the Choi Min-seok–Lim Chan-gyu logjam at the top. KT enters the season’s final stretch as the KBO’s first-place team, and its ability to keep winning without missing a beat, even as opponents lean on Asian Games absences of their own, has become part of the storyline underpinning both the team and individual title races.
That broader context matters for reading Hilliard’s chase correctly. He is not simply a hot hand riding a favorable schedule — he is a middle-of-the-order power source on the league’s best team, hitting home runs in the middle of a seven-game winning streak that has nothing to do with Kim Do-young’s absence and everything to do with KT’s own roster construction. The Asian Games situation has simply made his existing production more visible in a specific, countable way: a gap that looked like a comfortable four-to-five-home-run cushion two weeks ago is now a four-homer margin with real weeks of games left to play.
Sam Hilliard’s Path From Waiver Wire to KBO Contender
Hilliard’s arrival in Korea followed a familiar path for import hitters in the KBO — a productive but not quite everyday major league career, followed by a one-year deal signed to lead a foreign roster spot in Korea. The KT Wiz brought him in on a contract worth roughly $1 million, split between salary and a signing bonus, to round out their foreign-player mix for the 2026 season. It did not look, in April, like a signing that would put him in a home run race. Hilliard hit just five home runs in his first 28 KBO games and went through a 14-game stretch without one at all, a slow enough start that it would have been reasonable to write him off as a replacement-level import bat rather than a title contender.
What changed was almost entirely about power production arriving all at once. Since the start of May, Hilliard has hit home runs at closer to a 20-percent-of-games pace, a stretch of production that by mid-August already had him within single digits of the league’s top two home run hitters and by mid-September had turned him into a genuine factor in the race rather than a name mentioned for context. It is a reminder that KBO import signings, unlike most MLB roster decisions, are frequently bets on a single skill translating well to a different league and a lighter overall workload — and that those bets can take months to pay off, if they pay off at all, before a player like Hilliard suddenly looks like one of the best imports in the league.
What Happens When Kim Do-young Comes Back
None of this changes what happens when Korea’s Asian Games baseball tournament wraps up on September 27 and its players return to their KBO clubs for the final stretch of the regular season, which runs through October 7. Kim Do-young will presumably rejoin KIA with his 40 home runs still intact, and whatever cushion he holds — or doesn’t — over Austin Dean and Sam Hilliard at that point will determine how tight the final ten days of the home run race actually are. If Dean or Hilliard have closed the gap further by then, Kim will need to out-homer both of them over roughly two weeks of games to hold on to a title he has led for months. If Austin Dean pulls into a tie or ahead in the meantime, LG’s slugger will already have set the franchise’s single-season home run record in the process, adding an extra layer of stakes to whichever direction the race ultimately breaks.
The same logic applies to Lim Chan-gyu and Choi Min-seok, whose shared 14-win mark could easily separate by two, three, or more by the time both pitchers are back to throwing on a normal schedule. Neither race will be decided by the Asian Games itself — Korea’s players aren’t accumulating KBO statistics while they’re in Japan chasing a gold medal. But both races are, for these two and a half weeks, being decided in large part by who isn’t there to contest them, which is its own kind of quietly dramatic storyline hiding inside a stretch run that, on paper, is supposed to be about which teams make the KBO postseason.