The Los Angeles Dodgers released their 26-man roster for the National League Championship Series on the morning of October 12 in Korea, and one name that had quietly haunted the club’s infield depth chart all October was missing from it. Hyeseong Kim, the South Korean infielder who signed a contract worth up to $22 million before the 2025 season, will not be part of the Dodgers’ roster for their NLCS matchup against the Milwaukee Brewers. In his place, the Dodgers added left-handed pitcher Justin Wrobleski, opting for bullpen depth over a bench bat as they chase a third consecutive World Series title.
For Kim, the decision closes out a brutal October in miniature: across the entirety of the Dodgers’ National League Division Series win over the Atlanta Braves, he appeared in exactly one game, entering as a defensive substitute at second base in the ninth inning of a series-clinching Game 4. That one half-inning was the full extent of his 2026 postseason before the roster cut arrived.
A Decision the Dodgers Had Been Signaling For Days
This was not a surprise announcement, at least not to anyone who had been following American coverage of the Dodgers’ roster math. Once the NLDS ended, multiple U.S. outlets had already begun forecasting that Kim would be left off the NLCS roster, reasoning that a best-of-seven series against a stacked Brewers lineup would push the Dodgers to prioritize pitching depth over a seldom-used bench infielder. When the actual 26-man roster was released, The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya — who covers the Dodgers beat closely — confirmed in his own reporting that Kim’s name was indeed absent. Korean sports media treated the moment as a case of local predictions catching up to what American reporters had already called days earlier.
The mechanics of the decision were straightforward, at least as the club explained them. Division Series format caps a series at five games; the Championship Series can run as long as seven. That extra innings workload, spread across a longer series, pushed the Dodgers to carry an additional arm rather than an additional bat. Wrobleski, a left-handed reliever, took the open spot.
There was also a variable working against Kim that had nothing to do with his own performance: veteran infielder Miguel Rojas. Rojas had been dealing with a hip and lower-back issue that put his own postseason availability in question, and for a stretch there was a real scenario in which Rojas’ injury could open 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
To understand how thin Kim’s postseason footprint has been, it helps to walk through exactly what happened in the NLDS. The Dodgers beat the Braves in four games at Atlanta’s Truist Park, closing out the series with a 4-1 win in Game 4 to advance to the NLCS 3-1. Kim’s involvement in that series-clinching victory consisted of a single ninth-inning appearance as a defensive replacement at second base. He did not record a plate appearance in the series. That is the entirety of his October on the field: one defensive substitution, one half-inning, zero at-bats.
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 swing mechanics 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 Matters Beyond One Roster Spot
For readers unfamiliar with how the KBO-to-MLB pipeline usually works, Kim’s situation is a useful corrective to a common assumption: that a posting fee and a multi-year MLB contract guarantee a player instant big-league stability. Kim wasn’t an unproven prospect when he left Korea — he was regarded as one of the Kiwoom Heroes’ standout infielders, the kind of player a club pays a substantial fee to post rather than let walk for nothing. Yet in his first full MLB season, he was optioned to Triple-A not once in some minor technicality, but as a response to a visible decline in performance, with coaching staff identifying mechanical issues in his swing that needed to be fixed away from the major-league stage.
That journey — hot start, mechanical breakdown, demotion, recall, and now a postseason roster snub — illustrates just how unforgiving the transition to MLB can be, even for players who didn’t need to prove themselves at the lower levels of a farm system the way most rookies do. A $22 million contract buys opportunity and patience from a front office; it does not buy a guaranteed everyday role, and it clearly didn’t buy Kim a spot on this particular October roster.
The Door Isn’t Completely Shut
Despite the cut, Kim’s season isn’t necessarily finished. Multiple outlets reporting on the roster decision noted that two scenarios could still bring him back: if the Dodgers advance to the World Series, rosters can be reset between rounds, giving the club a chance to reconsider its construction; and if a player on the active NLCS roster is sidelined by injury during the series, a replacement would need to be named, and Kim remains in the organization as a plausible candidate. Neither scenario has happened, and both remain purely hypothetical for now — but they are the two realistic paths by which Kim could still see postseason action beyond the single half-inning he has logged so far.
Two Korean Infielders, Two Different Octobers
There’s a parallel playing out this postseason that Korean sports coverage has picked up on: in the very same NLDS that ended Kim’s regular involvement, an infielder with a similar-sounding name on the opposing roster saw his season end entirely. Atlanta Braves infielder Ha-seong Kim — a different player, unrelated to Hyeseong Kim beyond sharing a common Korean surname — was eliminated from the postseason altogether when the Braves lost the series to the Dodgers. One Kim’s team advanced while he was sidelined to a bench role; the other Kim’s season simply ended. It’s a reminder that “making the postseason roster” and “playing a meaningful role in October” are two very different bars to clear, and that even within the same series, the fortunes of players who share a name can diverge completely.
Why Teams Load Up on Pitching for a Seven-Game Series
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 gives Dodgers manager Dave Roberts another matchup option against a Brewers lineup that will see extended at-bats from the same hitters over multiple games, rather than the quicker look a five-game series allows. In that context, trading a bench infielder who had one half-inning of postseason work for a fresh bullpen arm is a defensible baseball decision, even if it’s a difficult one for the player on the losing end of it.
How the KBO Posting System Actually Works
For readers less familiar with how players move from Korean baseball to MLB, the posting system is worth explaining in a bit more detail, since it shapes why a deal like Kim’s looked the way it did. A KBO club that wants to let a player negotiate with MLB teams files a formal posting notice, which opens a fixed window — in Kim’s case, a window that ran from early December 2024 into early January 2025 — during which any MLB club can negotiate directly with the player. If the player signs with an MLB team before the window closes, his original KBO club receives a posting fee, calculated as a percentage of the guaranteed value of the contract the player signs. That fee is separate from, and in addition to, whatever salary the player himself receives. It’s why Kiwoom’s roughly $4.2 million return and Kim’s up-to-$22 million contract are two different numbers that both resulted from the same transaction — one compensates the Korean club for developing and releasing a player early, the other compensates the player himself. The system has become a well-worn pipeline for Korean talent in recent years, sending infielders, outfielders, and pitchers to MLB organizations on a near-annual basis, with varying degrees of big-league success once they arrive.
What Comes Next
The NLCS between the Dodgers and Brewers is now underway, with Los Angeles chasing a third straight World Series championship. For Kim, the next meaningful opportunity to contribute would come either in a potential World Series roster reset or through a midseries injury replacement — both scenarios 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 finally, a roster cut that American media saw coming before it was officially announced. Whether the Dodgers’ World Series pursuit creates one more chapter for him this October remains to be seen.