Dodgers Open January Transfer Market, Sign Hye-seong Kim From KBO

Another year, another star from one of Asia’s major leagues comes over to play in Los Angeles. KBO infielder Hye-seong Kim is trading his burgundy Kiwoom Heroes uniform for Dodger blue. Kim, who turns 26 at the end of this month, has won four straight KBO Golden Glove Awards — one at shortstop, three at second base. He comes to the United States after a year in which he posted a 118 wRC+ and stole 30 bases, with career bests in home runs, RBI, strikeout rate, and slugging percentage.

What’s the price for this golden Adonis of an infielder? Just $12.5 million guaranteed over three years, plus a $2.5 million release fee due to Kim’s old club. And if the Dodgers like what they see, they can keep Kim for an another two seasons — 2028 and 2029 — for an additional $9.5 million.

How do they keep getting away with this?

In case you couldn’t tell by the way I was pouring things on a little thick up there, Kim’s star status might not survive the trip across the Pacific. That career high in home runs I was talking about? Eleven. And that’s the first time Kim has reached double digits in his career, despite playing at least 120 games in each of the past seven seasons. His ISO last year was just .132, also a career high. Kim hit two grounders for every fly ball in 2024; as recently as 2022, that ratio was almost 5-to-1.

I’m trying not to overuse “he’ll get the bat knocked out of his hands,” but if ever there were a time to put a dollar in the swear jar, it’s for the 5-foot-10, 172-pound Kim. Not every undersized Korean infielder suffers from a troubling lack of thump; Kim’s former Heroes teammate, the similarly named Ha-Seong Kim, turned into a pretty good hitter after signing with the Padres (albeit after a pretty rough rookie year). Ha-Seong Kim has averaged 12 home runs and 34 extra-base hits per season in his MLB career, with a wRC+ of 101.

But Ha-Seong Kim hit at least 19 home runs in all six of his full KBO seasons, and topped out at 30 in his walk year. If Hye-seong Kim wants to develop credible big league power, he’s really going to have to start eating his spinach. It could happen — Freddy Galvis had two 20-homer seasons, for God’s sake — but it’s unlikely in the extreme.

Judging by Kim’s contract, and the state of the rest of the Dodgers’ roster, I suspect that Andrew Friedman and his lieutenants 1) already know this, and 2) don’t care that much.

Kim is purportedly an exceptional defensive second baseman who should be capable of playing an MLB-caliber shortstop as well. He can also run — for evidence, consider his seven consecutive seasons of 20 or more stolen bases, with a career high of 46 and a career success rate of 85.4%. So he can run, he doesn’t strike out much, and let’s assume he’s a good glove up the middle. Is this… Isiah Kiner-Falefa in a good year?

That’d sound underwhelming to some, but consider the context. The Dodgers can not only afford to hand out guaranteed multi-year contracts to their utility infielders, they do it routinely. And they kind of have to.

In order to comply with league rules for a standard gameday roster, the Dodgers have to field at least 11 position players. They have to carry at least 25 total players (out of a maximum of 26), of whom no more than 13 can be pitchers, and because Shohei Ohtani is a two-way player, he doesn’t count toward that total. Those players have to come from the Dodgers’ 40-man roster, and because your average Dodgers pitcher gets his UCL swapped out more frequently than I rotate the tires on my Subaru, Los Angeles is currently devoting 25 40-man roster spots to pitchers, not counting Ohtani. Some of those spots will get cleared up once the 60-day IL comes back into play next month — presumably, this is when the Dodgers will re-sign Clayton Kershaw — but right now, the Dodgers barely have enough position players to field a gameday squad.

Ohtani has DH locked down. Freddie Freeman has first base locked down. If both of those guys are in the lineup, Max Muncy has to play third while Teoscar Hernández and Michael Conforto man the outfield corners (assuming that the Dodgers didn’t give Conforto $17 million to play the long end of a platoon). Catcher goes to Will Smith, with perpetual backup Austin Barnes behind him and Hunter Feduccia as a Triple-A standby. (Former top prospect Diego Cartaya got DFA’d to make room for Kim.)

That leaves the two middle infield positions, center field, and three bench spots to be divided among eight players. Here they are, listed with their ages (as of Opening Day), 2025 salaries, and the positions where they made at least one start in 2024.

Betts and Edman are must-starts, somewhere. And should a starting job open up lower down the defensive spectrum, Betts can slide back into right field or Edman can play third without being a gigantic sucking nullity in the middle of the lineup. That makes backup in the middle of the infield useful to the Dodgers, whose existing options are either old or potentially useful trade bait. (For those of you keeping track, David Bote is with the Dodgers now, albeit on a minor-league contract with a spring training invite.)

Can the Dodgers survive with Kim playing a decent shortstop and not providing much offensively? Look no further than Rojas for the answer. The Dodgers gave the former Marlin $15 million over three years — i.e. exactly the same price they’re paying for Kim, including posting fee — while he was coming off a 68 wRC+ in his age-33 season. Rojas hit .236/.290/.322 in his first season back with Los Angeles and still managed to make his way into 125 games that year.

The Dodgers have committed $12.5 million to Kim, but they already have $100 million, give or take, committed to Taylor, Rojas, and Edman — not counting what they’ve already paid those players. The Dodgers have more money committed to players who can credibly be called “utility infielders” than the Marlins, A’s, and White Sox have committed to all their players put together from now until the end of time.

So this isn’t another franchise-altering signing from one of the league’s richest teams. This is the Dodgers adding depth to a roster made up almost entirely of shortstops and designated hitters, with little in between. They’re finding the next Rojas before their current one goes bad.

I’ll spare a moment for the corresponding roster move here, because you’re probably wondering what the heck happened to Cartaya.

Cartaya was the no. 22 prospect in baseball before the 2023 season — others in that neighborhood included Josh Jung, Brandon Pfaadt, Grayson Rodriguez, and Kyle Harrison, just for context. Even after a brutal 2023 campaign, Eric Longenhagen rated him the third-best prospect in the Dodgers’ system last year, because catchers who can hit are so vanishingly rare. So I want to play a game with you real quick. I’ll quote the first two sentences of Eric’s write-up, and you see how many red flags you can find:

After he slashed a disappointing .189/.278/.379 at Double-A Tulsa, Cartaya won FanGraphs’ 2023 Resolve-Testing Catcher of the Year award, a honor previously bestowed upon Bo Naylor, Henry Davis, and MJ Melendez. Some of the underlying hit tool issues that Cartaya performed in spite of during previous seasons became untenable in 2023, as upper-level opposing pitchers executed to the locations he struggles to cover, which are copious.

I count five red flags:

1. Sub-Mendoza Line Double-A batting average
2. “Resolve-Testing Catcher of the Year” award
3. Adjacent references to Davis and Melendez
4. The big one: “underlying hit tool issues”
5. “Copious,” when used to describe struggles

I’ll give half a flag for “became untenable,” which always seems to be used in an ominous context. Like, you’re more likely to find the word “untenable” in the first chapter of a book about the collapse of a dam than in the first verse of a love song.

So what happened after all that setup? More of the same, unfortunately. Cartaya slipped to 13th in the midseason update of the Dodgers prospect list, which went out around the time he got promoted to Triple-A. In 49 games there, Cartaya hit .208/.293/.350, which would be downright competent by the standards of major league catchers, but this is in a league where a wRC+ of 100 translates to an OPS over .800. Hitting .208 at that level? Well, turns out it gets you cut.

Especially since the Dodgers only have room to carry 15 position players.