Just over a month after signing a one-year, $20MM deal to come back to the club, Braves shortstop Ha-Seong Kim went down with a torn tendon in his finger. The team announced the initial recovery timeline to be four to five months. Kim is trending toward an earlier return. General manager Alex Anthopoulos told reporters, including Mark Bowman of MLB.com, that there’s hope Kim could come back in early May.
Kim popped up as an option on MLBTR’s list of 60-day IL candidates, though he was more of a long shot. Atlanta will likely do what it can to avoid making that move if there’s any chance Kim can be back on the early end of the timeline. The recent update from Anthopoulos makes a 60-day IL placement all the more unlikely.
The Braves scooped up Kim off waivers from Tampa Bay late last season, with the Rays looking to duck the shortstop’s $16MM player option. Atlanta wasn’t able to get Kim back on the player option, but did convince him to sign for an extra $4MM as a free agent. He was set to return as the club’s starting shortstop.
Kim delivered solid production in his final three seasons in San Diego, including a 17-homer, 38-steal season in 2023. He also netted a Gold Glove award that year. Kim then landed in Tampa Bay as a free agent. The Rays gave him a two-year, $29MM deal with an opt-out, despite the fact that Kim was recovering from right shoulder surgery. He played just 24 games with the team.
Atlanta will likely patch together the shortstop position until Kim is healthy. The team acted quickly after the news broke, signing utilityman Jorge Mateo the very next day. Mateo has bounced around defensively in his six-year career, but he’s spent the most time at shortstop (294 appearances). The Braves acquired Mauricio Dubón in a trade with the Astros. Nick Allen, Atlanta’s primary shortstop last season, went the other way in the deal. Dubón is a candidate to mix in at the position. The Braves also re-acquired Brett Wisely as additional infield depth.
Led by the defensive-minded Allen, the Braves finished dead last in OPS at shortstop in 2025. Allen put up a .530 mark in 408 plate appearances. Orlando Arcia, Vidal Bruján, and Luke Williams were even worse. Kim slashed a middling .253/.316/.368 in two dozen games with Atlanta.
Photo courtesy of Jordan Godfree, Imagn Images
So sick of being a “mid level” payroll team
You think a top 6 payroll is a mid level payroll team
No they are a top 5 payroll getting mid level results. We need another Starter.
We needed to attack SS in the draft 5 years ago to were we didn’t have to pay 20 mil for Kim but “pitching is currency” and now we have the worst minors league farm system I’m baseball because we just overloaded on slow throwing college pitching early on and injury prone pitching as well and just ignored position players and definitely middle infield for 5 years in the draft.
Weird that we have the “worst” minor leagues but keep calling up studs every year to help the MLB team.
Well when other teams don’t think you have a good farm system then you don’t have much in tradable assets…….duh.
Like maybe trading for a starting pitcher that we need to do like right now
@Braves Butt-Head
The Braves philosophy has been draft pitchers and sign the middle infielders through the international signings. Unfortunately the Braves international signees have not developed well.
Gil looks like he might end up being a future middle infielder. Perdomo has struggled so far. I’m excited to see how Manon develops and it sounds like the Braves are signing the top international prospect next year, SS Alfredo Sena.
The Braves have just missed on the international side of things so far. Is that the players, development system, both?
Coppy crippled the Braves when he got caught cheating. The loss of all their ifa prospects signed by Coppy and Hart and the next 4 years of ifa sanctions put the organization way behind every other MLB team. Finally starting to see some progress, but it’s been a long haul w/ifa prospects.
They actually spend a lot
The real problem is their strategy. Instead of handing out long term deals that are expensive for 1 player they overpay on a bunch of 1 or 2 year deals on inferior players with the theory that if it doesn’t work out they’ll be able to take another shot at someone new instead of being locked in to 1 guy
Problem with that is they still spend, and as I said it’s usually overpays to inferior players. Kim is a perfect example of this. If he doesn’t work out they’ll just say oh well no harm we’ll be free of it in a couple years anyway.
But when you repeat this you still end up spending a ton of money, if not more. You just spread it around to different guys.
It’s clear the strategy doesn’t work very well but they won’t change. I believe they’d be better off spending long term and taking a shot on one guy that has a track record of success than overspending on 1 or 2 year deals on less reliable players.
In what world Kim deserves $20 mil a year I don’t know. You can say it’s only for 1 year but they’ll turn around next year and spend another $20 mil on someone equally undeserving.
You take a hard look over time if you keep doing this you just spend $20 mil on mediocre to terrible players for 5-10 years before you know it, yet you can’t or won’t give out a 8 years, $200 mil contract to someone who has been consistently performing well…. Like Max Fried for example
If he can get healthy, 20M is perfectly reasonable for Kim.
@Braves2032 Optionality. A 2.5 war SS is worth 20m btw
You make it sound like every FA contract for big money works out. Do you think they would have been better off signing Javy Baez? Keep in mind that that would leave less money for other positions. Sorry, can’t afford Morton this year. Have to pay even less for the LF of the year. Total payroll doesn’t change. How it gets spread over the entire roster does.
Kim healthy is a .240, .700 ops hitter. Yet I bet most of you will turn around and still claim it was smart to not resign Swanson…. Who is performing closer to a .245, .720 ops hitter.
And that’s with him underperforming to this point. Yet Kim gets a pass with you all for some reason.
The Braves have really manipulated its fan base astonishingly well into believing their techniques are the best approach. End of the day though you have the 6th highest payroll (according to the post above) finishing nowhere near 6th best record. It’s nothing but a mismanagement of funds.
Braves aren’t much better run than the Mets at this point. But you guys keep defending it instead of identifying the real problem and correcting it. The FO doesn’t bother doing a self assessment after all, so why should we all??
Wha are you talking about? The Braves didn’t spend $20 mil on Morton and Kim in the same season. They dropped their $20 mil on Morton one season now Kim another season.
Obviously it’s a technique they’ve adopted so there’s differences and yeah one of them is it switches players/positions where the money is dumped.
The entire point…. Valid which I may add… is the money is not spent well even with these differences. You overpay on these 1 year deals and they are more likely to not pan out (if you analyze them on a year to year basis) than if you give a large contract out to a single player
There’s a misconception that it’s extremely risky and a huge disaster if you sign a Baez.
Of course that’s bad of course it may happen. No one said that going after guys long term can’t go bad.
But do you really think signing Kim and Morton for 1 or 2 year deals over an 8-10 year span (meaning it goes to different players all of those years… but they are of Kim caliber) will produce more successful results in that year to year analysis than giving someone like Fried or Swanson or even Baez a 8-10 year long term deal and betting on one horse?
People really have it baked in their heads that the betting on one horse, even if it’s a much more established and proven horse is the worse way to go. The reason is it’s much more noticeable if you do get saddled with a Baez, whereas the Braves Kim method, even if it fails when they sink $20 mil into 8 different players for 8 straight years, will go largely unnoticed because it will be a different player failing to measure up and booted out after their 1 year mistake. Is that result not equally disastrous though? Of course it is. But it takes a lot more effort to identify that the Braves spent poorly instead of being able to isolate it to 1 person on a long term deal gone bad like with Baez. That’s why they can get away with this little trick and many of you can’t see how poorly they are run.
Kim is a terrible allocation of funds and they do this all the time. Sure it’s a hyperbole to say they’ve had 8 straight years of utter failure with 8 different players. There’s a mix in there. You might get 1 or 2 that really exceed and then you have fans saying “wow look how great of a move it was to bring in Donaldson!”. The flip side of that is you have to turn around and replicate it the very next year and resign someone else on a random throw of the dart on another short term deal. The success is much less likely to be sustained.
The long term deal is also not as black and white as all years great or all years bad. You’re still more likely to come out with better results overall. Problem is so many of you will look at a long term deal and if the player only played well 4 of they 8 years then classify it as a bad deal. But the 1-year contract let’s say only 2 of the 8 worked out you’ll point to those 2 huge successes and be impressed with how well AA can find those great deals ignoring the other 6 years… because again it’s harder to track as the money moves around to different players.
It’s like a magic trick really. But anyone who takes the time to look close enough can tell you this method has a track record of poor results compared to the long term deals handed out. It’s just harder to criticize at the end of the day.
If you’re too lazy to follow the track record I’ll do a short audit for you.
We can even stat with the 2019 Donaldson signing which was a huge success… so I’m generously kicking it off with a win for this 1-year method.
After Donaldson… here’s how they dumped their money
2020 – Cole Hamels
2021 – Skipped
2022 – Kenley Jansen
2023 & 2024 – Charlie Morton
2025 – Profar
2026 – Kim
Since they skipped a year it’s a 7 year stretch instead of 8. You got 1 amazing season from Donaldson… huge success. Jansen was a mediocre signing, I remember many shaky moments and most people did not want him back. Yes he did save a lot of games but the Braves we’re winning a lot of games. Morton, Profar, and Hamels were all failures. Kim is off to a bad start. Keep in mind these were the Morton 1 year deals where he had clearly hit his decline. They previously weren’t going year to year with him so don’t confuse his previous success with when he fell into the big 1-year contract category.
You guys would rather have that stretch of players than go after 1 player on 6 to 8 year deal?
The way I see it is you only need one year to go well and 1 year to be mediocre if you bet it all on 1 player for 7 years to match given this audit of success.
This still a good technique over a long term deal with someone?
2032, I completely agree with your premise of the short term higher aav deals being a poor option compared to a longer guarantee with a more proven player. The only problem is those proven players are in higher demand and rare. You can’t always get the players you coveted so you have to fall back to the short term deal guy. Swanson was probably the better option so far but signing that deal would have limited their choices later on. Maybe they didn’t use the opportunities available very well but they still had them
If the Braves didn’t give him $20 million, some other team would have. It’s the going rate for players of his caliber.
No, just made mistakes of where we spent money. The main one is Profar, below average defensively, last year there was a deep fly ball to left and he looked like a 12 year old playing it. We have money to spend but was not spent wisely. Our bullpen with the exception of two players is average to below average. We have no depth to our starters. I think Strider bounces back this year and Sale is one of the best but where you going to go next. I would feel 100 percent better if we had one more hoss to ride.
Profar also had a 126 wRC+ last year. I think they were paying him mostly for his offensive abilities.
Yep, and that’s why AA signed Yaz. Improve the outfield defense and keep Profar’s bat in the lineup as a dh vs rh pitching when Yaz plays and Baldwin catches.
Braves will be ok until Kim and Murphy return. Weak strength of schedule in April . 6 games against the Phil’s will test us . Nothing like last season. We still need another Starter tho .
We should look into the injury – I heard he hurt his hand fighting in a club
Yeah, you look into that.
Kim was a waste of 20 million.
So there is a way that players can return earlier from injury in Atlanta? Alex and Walt need to pay up to find out what kind of doctor, pill, potion, or devil magic that can make that happen,