Ha-Seong Kim Returns to Atlanta on One-Year Deal

Well, the Braves must have liked what they saw. After Atlanta claimed Ha-Seong Kim off waivers in September and watched him decline his $16 million option for the 2026 season, the team is bringing him back on a one-year, $20 million contract. In a rare coup, Jon Heyman scooped the Braves by breaking the news before they could slap some text onto their trusty press release template and post a JPEG to social media. (Peter Labuza of Twins Daily made note of the most important part of the deal: The press release featured no mention of Kim donating 1% of his salary to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.) The reunion isn’t necessarily surprising, as president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos expressed interest in bringing Kim back when he opted out. However, the deal represents a departure from Atlanta’s recent strategy, and doesn’t match most of the estimates of what Kim would get in free agency.

This is the first time the Braves have deigned to spend money on the shortstop position since they let Dansby Swanson walk in 2022. They rolled with Orlando Arcia in 2023, and he rewarded them with a 100 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR. When Arcia reverted back to his career norms with a 72 wRC+ in 2023, the Braves got just 0.7 WAR from the position, fifth worst in the league. The punchless, slick-fielding Nick Allen didn’t work out in 2025, prompting the team to claim Kim; on the year, Atlanta’s 0.4 WAR at short was third from the bottom. They recently traded Allen to Houston in exchange for utilityman Mauricio Dubón, who has surprisingly good numbers at short but isn’t really an everyday option. The Braves are clearly sick of having a gaping black hole at short, but you might not be prepared for just how big a departure this is. Swanson made just $10 million in his final year of arbitration, meaning the Braves are about to spend double the amount they’ve ever spent on a shortstop.

Coming into the offseason, most estimates had Kim signing a deal like the one he signed with the Rays last year: two or three years with an opt-out for something like $15 million per year. That made sense, because he was still in a similar position. After a brilliant seven-year KBO career, Kim struggled in his first stateside campaign, then settled in as a reliably above-average middle infielder for the Padres. From 2022 to 2024, he combined great defense with a 106 wRC+, averaging 3.7 WAR per 150 games. That’s a borderline All-Star at a premium position. In 2023, Kim won a Gold Glove and earned some MVP votes. He looked primed for a payday and a long contract heading into free agency. Instead, he tore the labrum in his right shoulder diving back into first base against the Rockies in August 2024.

The injury ended his season early and led to that pillow deal with the Rays. The surgery, followed by hamstring and calf injuries, kept him out until July, and after back issues cost him two more IL stints, Kim found himself in Atlanta. He got into just 48 games in 2025 and very understandably didn’t look quite like himself. He clearly believed that he could get more than $16 million on the open market, even on a prove-it deal, and that move paid off. Although the deal is just for one year, Anthopoulos has continued to be direct about his desire to lock Kim up, telling reporters, “Our goal is for him to have a great year and we keep him long-term beyond this.”

Kim is 30 years old and coming off a lost season. The big question is whether we should expect him to look like he did from 2022 to 2024. The strongest indicator that we should is that the Braves saw him up close for the last month of the season, and although both his offense and defense graded out as below average in Atlanta, they obviously liked what they saw. The numbers can tell us a bit more.

As with any shoulder injury, the concern is a player getting their strength back. The good news is that Kim certainly looked strong enough at the plate. He matched his max exit velocity from 2023 and 2024, and his average and 90th-percentile exit velocities were the highest of his career. We’re talking about just 191 plate appearances and 134 batted ball events, but it doesn’t take all that many to prove that you’re capable of hitting the ball as hard as you used to. Kim’s offensive numbers weren’t great, both because not all of that hard contact turned into slug and because he ran his worst walk and strikeout numbers since 2021. Still, it’s hard to fault him for that in such a short, injury-marred season, especially when the underlying metrics looked fine. His chase rate took a dip, but it was by no means outside his career norms, and his zone contact rate was the best of his career. As I noted back when the Braves claimed him, he also saw a spike in pitches on the edge of the strike zone, the kind of fluky thing that can wreak havoc on your numbers over a short time period. Kim ran a wRC+ of just 82, but he had put up 48-game stretches with worse performance in all four of his previous MLB seasons. It happens.

The bigger question is how the surgery will affect Kim’s arm strength going forward. In 2024, it averaged 88 mph from short, which ranked 12th out of 66 qualified shortstops. In 2025, that number was down to 83.9 mph, a drop of more than four ticks. Perhaps even more important, Kim’s hardest throw was just 87.1 mph, nearly 5 mph off his best mark in 2024. However, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First, that big drop is scary, but it still leaves Kim with an above-average arm for the position, 22nd out of 65 qualified shortstops. Second, we’re not talking about a ton of chances here. Statcast had Kim with just 164 throws from shortstop in 2025, fewer than half as many as he had in 2024. Most infield chances are routine, which means he just didn’t have that many reasons to unleash his hardest throws. In previous seasons, Kim always had a difference of at least 4 mph between his average throw and his max. In 2024, the gap was closer to three ticks, an indicator that he might not have been letting the ball loose with as much abandon as he had previously. That’s understandable, but it might change as the surgery gets smaller in the rearview mirror.

Third, Kim’s arm didn’t hurt his performance, according to either Statcast or Baseball Prospectus’ Throwing Runs. In fact, Kim’s arm has put up a neutral run value every season of his career according to both metrics. He’s always made his defensive impact with his range. That impact was positive in every season until 2025, and it’s hard to knock him too much for grading out as slightly below average while he was recovering from surgery and dealing with hamstring, calf, and back injuries.

So that’s where we are. Injuries completely derailed Kim’s 2025 season, but it was hard to see any definite reasons to downgrade his future performance, with the possible exception of his arm strength. Moreover, he was the second-best shortstop (and, depending on what you think of Bo Bichette defensively, the best true shortstop) on the free agent market.

Still, none of this is guaranteed. The Braves were only on the hook for roughly $2 million of Kim’s salary in 2025, but they’ll be paying him 10 times as much in 2026. Risks lurk around every corner. We won’t know whether Kim’s arm will get back to full strength until we see it happen. He just turned 30, and he’s coming off injuries to four different body parts in 2025. It’s not at all hard to imagine at least one of them resurfacing. Should they cost him a meaningful amount of time or hamper his performance, it could really hurt the Braves and it could once again really hurt Kim’s chances of getting a good, long-term deal. And while there’s every reason to believe that his bat is back to where it was, that previous position was always right around the league average. Even fully healthy, down years at the plate happen, and Kim isn’t starting from all that high a place. The Braves know all that better than anyone, and they’re still prepared to bet $20 million that Kim is still the player he used to be.