Kim Ha-seong has not managed a hit in 20 consecutive at-bats. His batting average sits at .113, a number that would look more at home on a National League pitcher’s stat line from the pre-designated-hitter era than on an everyday infielder drawing a $20 million salary. And yet, on the same night his slump reached its ugliest depth, it was Kim’s bat — or more precisely, his bunt — that set up the winning run in a dramatic extra-innings victory for the Atlanta Braves. The very next day, the Braves benched him anyway.
On September 24 (Korea time), Kim started at shortstop and hit ninth against the Cincinnati Reds at Truist Park. He went 0-for-3 with a strikeout: a flyout to right field in the third inning, a swinging strikeout in the fifth, and a flyout to shortstop in the seventh. None of it was memorable in the way a hitter wants to be remembered. It extended his hitless streak to seven straight games and 20 consecutive at-bats, and it dropped his season average to .113 — 14 hits in 124 at-bats.
The Bunt That Changed Everything
The game itself refused to end quietly. Atlanta and Cincinnati were knotted at 2-2 after nine innings, forcing extra baseball. In the bottom of the tenth, with a runner on second base and nobody out, Kim Ha-seong stepped to the plate — not to swing for a hit, but to sacrifice. He squared around and laid down a bunt that advanced the runner to third base, executing the fundamentally unglamorous kind of play that rarely shows up in a highlight reel but frequently decides games.
It worked. Drake Baldwin was hit by a pitch to load the bases, and Mauricio Dubón followed with an infield single that brought the runner home from third for a 3-2 walk-off win. Kim Ha-seong, who couldn’t buy a hit for the better part of two weeks, had just laid down the single most important at-bat of the entire game — one that didn’t require a hit at all.
There’s a particular kind of irony in that sequence. A player mired in one of the worst offensive stretches of his major-league career delivered exactly the situational, winning play a contending team needs in October. It’s the sort of moment that complicates any simple narrative about a slump: Kim’s bat has gone cold, but his baseball instincts — reading the situation, executing a fundamental, moving a runner into scoring position when his team needed it most — clearly haven’t.
Then, Just Like That, He’s Benched
Whatever goodwill that sacrifice bunt bought Kim with his manager, it wasn’t enough to keep him in the lineup the following day. On September 25 (Korea time), the final game of the same three-game series against Cincinnati, Atlanta left Kim Ha-seong off the starting lineup entirely. Utility infielder Mauricio Dubón — the same player whose infield single had scored the winning run off Kim’s bunt just a day earlier — took over at shortstop in his place.
Heading into that game, Kim’s numbers told a stark story: a .113 batting average, 9 RBIs on the season, and an OPS of just .331 — a figure so low it barely registers as offensive production at the major-league level. Reports indicated Atlanta’s plan going forward would have Dubón handle shortstop against right-handed starting pitching, with Kim shifted into a bench role, available for pinch-hitting or defensive substitution duty rather than everyday at-bats.
It’s a significant demotion in role, even if it isn’t framed as punitive. For a player who has spent most of the season entrenched as Atlanta’s regular shortstop, sliding into a situational bench role in the final stretch of the year — right as the games start to matter more, not less — is the kind of signal that’s hard to read as anything but a loss of confidence from the coaching staff, even a temporary one.
Tracing the Collapse: From a Pinch-Hit Hero to 20 Hitless At-Bats
To understand how dramatic this fall has been, it helps to rewind less than two weeks. Kim’s most recent hit before this stretch came on September 12 (Korea time), when he was called on as a pinch hitter against the Philadelphia Phillies and delivered a go-ahead hit that rescued the game for Atlanta — the kind of high-leverage, off-the-bench heroics that looked, in the moment, like it might be the spark that turned his season around.
Instead, it was the last time he reached base by hit for eleven days and counting. Every plate appearance since has come up empty. Twenty at-bats, zero hits, across seven consecutive games. That kind of whiplash — a signature clutch moment immediately followed by a complete offensive shutdown — is difficult to explain away as simple bad luck, and difficult to fix with any single mechanical adjustment. It’s the profile of a hitter who is, for whatever reason, completely out of sync at the plate, even as his instincts for situational baseball remain sharp.
A Résumé That Makes the Slump Sting More
None of this is happening to a replacement-level player nobody expected much from. Kim Ha-seong broke into the major leagues with the San Diego Padres, and in 2023 he won the National League’s Gold Glove at the utility infield position — logging time at second base, third base, and shortstop that season while handling all three spots capably enough to become the first Korean-born player, and the first Asian-born infielder in major-league history, to win the award. It was a landmark achievement that helped push back against a long-standing, unfair assumption in the sport that Asian-born infielders lacked the physical tools to hold down demanding defensive positions at the highest level.
From San Diego, Kim’s path took him to the Tampa Bay Rays — a stretch he has since described candidly as an isolating one, a clubhouse where he struggled to find teammates to really connect with. Atlanta claimed him off waivers from Tampa Bay, giving him a fresh start and, eventually, a real role on a contending roster. When his contract came up after the 2025 season, Kim chose to stay rather than immediately test the open market: he re-signed with Atlanta on a one-year, $20 million deal — a $4 million raise over his previous salary — with a plan to return to free agency after 2026, betting that a strong platform year would set up a bigger long-term deal than what was on the table at the time.
That contract is the backdrop against which this slump is playing out. A “prove it” season invites more scrutiny than a normal one, and finishing that season with a .113 batting average and a demotion to bench duty is not the story Kim or his representatives were hoping to write heading into his next trip through free agency.
The Glove Hasn’t Gone Anywhere — But Gloves Alone Don’t Win Playoff Roster Spots
It’s worth remembering exactly what made Kim so valuable in the first place, because it clarifies what’s actually at stake here. His 2023 Gold Glove wasn’t a product of one highlight-reel play; it reflected a full season of steady, multi-position defensive reliability, delivered at a time when teams increasingly prize infielders who can move seamlessly between second, third, and shortstop without any drop-off in quality. That kind of defensive versatility doesn’t evaporate because a bat goes cold, and by most accounts, Kim’s glove work has remained an asset even during this brutal stretch at the plate.
But defensive value alone has limits, especially this deep into a pennant race on a team that has already clinched a postseason spot. A club weighing its 26-man October roster has to balance late-inning defensive reliability against bats capable of actually producing runs when the stakes are highest. That’s the exact tension defining Kim’s final stretch of the regular season: is a plus glove and the occasional flash of situational brilliance — a clutch pinch-hit knock here, a well-placed sacrifice bunt there — enough to justify a postseason roster spot when the everyday numbers next to his name look like this?
A Roster Picture That Keeps Shifting
Earlier in the season, an injury elsewhere on Atlanta’s infield had appeared to lock in a role for Kim by thinning out the team’s depth at his primary positions. At that point, the calculation seemed relatively simple: barring a full recovery from that other infielder, Kim’s versatility alone made him worth carrying into October as a defensive-minded reserve. That was before this current stretch — seven games, 20 at-bats, zero hits — pushed his season average down to .113 and, apparently, pushed him out of the everyday lineup entirely.
Now the conversation is shifting in real time. Being benched for a series finale against a team you’d otherwise expect to see plenty of at-bats against is a concrete signal, not just a hypothetical scenario floated by beat writers. Nothing is final — Atlanta’s front office has not announced a postseason roster, and any specific projection about who makes that 26-man group remains speculation until the team confirms it. But the terms of the conversation around Kim have moved from “how will he be deployed in October” to something closer to “will he be deployed at all if this continues,” and a bench day in the final week of September is part of why.
The Human Layer Underneath the Numbers
There’s a broader context worth sitting with here, beyond the batting-average arithmetic. Kim is not a rookie trying to establish himself, nor a fringe roster player scrapping for playing time. He is a Gold Glove winner who turned down an immediate look at the open market to bet on himself for one more year in a city and a clubhouse he’d chosen to stay in. He has spoken previously about the isolation he felt during his time in Tampa Bay — a period he left behind for what he’s described, in general terms, as a more comfortable environment in Atlanta.
Watching that same player’s production collapse in the final stretch of the season, in the very city and clubhouse he chose to remain in, adds an emotional layer that a bare .113 doesn’t capture on its own. It is, at once, a cautionary tale about how quickly a “prove it” season can go sideways, and a reminder — via one perfectly placed sacrifice bunt — that even a player in the worst slump of his career can still contribute meaningfully to winning baseball, just not in the way his contract was designed to reward.
What Comes Next
Atlanta has already clinched a postseason spot, which means the calculus for the season’s final week isn’t about making October — it’s about which 26 names go on the roster once October arrives. For Kim, that means a handful of remaining regular-season games, likely most of them from the bench, to find something resembling the form that once made him an everyday Gold Glove-caliber infielder. A hot week wouldn’t undo a .113 season average, but in the narrow, practical calculus of a postseason roster decision, even a modest string of good at-bats right now could shift the conversation back in his favor.
If the bat doesn’t come around, Atlanta faces a real decision: whether a player of Kim’s defensive pedigree and situational instincts — the same instincts that just delivered a walk-off-setting sacrifice bunt — is worth a spot on a championship-caliber roster when the bat has gone this quiet at the worst possible time. Either way, that decision won’t be made on reputation or on a single bunt. It will be made, as these things always are, by whatever happens in the at-bats — or the bench appearances — that are still left to play.
For now, the story of Kim Ha-seong’s September is a study in contrasts: a hitter who can’t buy a base hit, sitting on a bench the very day after his instincts helped win a game. Whatever happens over Atlanta’s final week of the regular season and into the postseason, this stretch — the bunt, the benching, and the .113 sitting between them — will be remembered as one of the strangest chapters of his major-league career.