Ha-Seong Kim’s Injury Leads Atlanta to Pivot at Short

Over the weekend, Ha-Seong Kim’s whirlwind offseason took a jarring tumble. After opting out of his contract with the Braves (really his contract with the Rays, which the Braves assumed after they claimed him off waivers), he turned around and signed a one-year, $20 million deal to remain in Atlanta. But disaster struck when he slipped on a sheet of ice and tore a tendon in his right middle finger. That injury required surgery that will sideline Kim for four to five months, including roughly the first two months of the regular season.

This will be the second straight season where Kim misses significant time due to injury. In late 2024, he tore his labrum on a pickoff throw, then injured his hamstring and later his calf while rehabbing, costing him the first half of 2025. He then hit the IL twice with back injuries last year. In all, he managed just 191 plate appearances and looked understandably rusty.

That star-crossed sequence has to raise questions about the future course of Kim’s career. How could it not? It’s not so much that any of these injuries are devastating on their own, but this much missed playing time over two-plus years of his prime is no laughing matter. Last year, he never hit his stride after a late start. This year, it’s fair to expect more of the same. Even without knowing how Kim’s injured finger might affect him upon his return, our projection systems have him down for a below-average offensive line.

That’s a big bummer for a very fun player. Kim’s defense on the middle infield – first at second base, then as a full-time shortstop – is downright electric. His 2023 Gold Glove (as a utility fielder) was well-deserved, and while defense tends to decline gently with age, I’d happily project him as above average with the glove for now. I’m not worried that Kim will stop being an acceptable major leaguer, in other words. I do think that some of his high-end outcomes have become meaningfully less likely, though.

The fever-dream version of Kim combines standout defense with the patient, contact-oriented approach that made him an OBP-machine and produced three straight seasons of double-digit homers to boot. In 2023, which still stands as his best season, he also swiped 38 bases (out of 47 attempts) thanks to solid baserunning instincts and plus foot speed. A Gold Glove-caliber shortstop who can take a walk and steal bases? That’s an All-Star, and Kim even garnered MVP votes that year. That might be his ceiling, but that’s not a bad thing; if your ceiling is “earning MVP votes” you’re doing pretty well.

That’s probably out of reach now. Kim lost a few steps in his measured sprint speed in 2025, and time remains undefeated when it comes to slowing people down. His defense graded out poorly in a tiny sample last year, too, which is probably partially rust and partially the fact that getting older and getting hurt leads to slightly worse fielding. Kim’s hitting is going to have to carry much more of the load if he’s going to be an impact player in the years ahead. That’s not impossible, of course, but 2,167 plate appearances into his big league career, I don’t think a sudden step change higher in power or BABIP is particularly likely, and those are the two places where he has room for improvement.

Kim’s future is clouded by this injury; so, too, is Atlanta’s present. After Dansby Swanson departed for Chicago before the 2023 season, the Braves spent the next three years basically punting the shortstop position. Orlando Arcia and Nick Allen, both castoffs from small-market clubs, are the only two Braves to hit 100 plate appearances’ worth of playing time at short in that time span. Claiming Kim off waivers, and then re-signing him in free agency, was supposed to be a pointed refutation of that plan.

The Braves are built to win now. Their best hitters are almost all in their primes. Chris Sale isn’t getting any younger. Raisel Iglesias and Robert Suarez, both signed this winter in free agency (Iglesias had already been a Brave, but his contract was up), are win-now pieces. So is Mike Yastrzemski. The division isn’t getting any easier. For a team that locks up its key core players early and then carefully plans which veterans to add around them, Kim’s absence could be a costly one.

Luckily, there are backup plans. The Braves swapped Allen for Mauricio Dubón earlier this winter, an eminently logical move for them. Dubón isn’t Allen’s equal defensively at shortstop, but he can play everywhere on the diamond, and hopefully hit a little too. He’s probably underqualified at shortstop, though, never mind his +6 FRV at the position in a minuscule 200-inning sample in 2025. Maybe he can handle it, but I’m skeptical, and clearly the Braves were hoping to use him as an occasional fill-in there, not a starter, what with signing Kim and all.

Thankfully, a more qualified defensive option was available in free agency for a reasonable rate. Mere days after Kim’s injury, Atlanta signed Jorge Mateo to a one-year deal reportedly worth $1 million, which I think is a great response to the situation they found themselves in. Like Dubón, Mateo is technically a utilityman. He’s a shortstop by trade, though, with more than 2,000 innings at the position in his big league career. Gunnar Henderson’s ascendance in Baltimore knocked him off of short, but that’s not exactly a disqualifying problem; very few shortstops wouldn’t lose their job to Henderson.

At his best, Mateo was a spectacular fielder, in the same general stratosphere as Kim. It’s been a few years since those highs, of course. The Orioles first moved Mateo to second base, where he was merely okay in a short year of work, and then to a variety of outfield positions he was ill-suited for. It wasn’t because his defensive value declined – it’s because Henderson has eclipsed 150 games played in each of the last three years, which means that when Mateo played, it was almost always elsewhere.

I’m optimistic that he’ll be roughly Kim’s equal defensively in 2026 despite those years in the wilderness. I’m meaningfully less optimistic about his offense, though. Mateo wasn’t a great hitter at the best of times; he’s swing-happy with little power, which means he rarely walks, doesn’t hit a ton of extra-base hits, and has intermittent strikeout issues. His wRC+ hovered around 80 when he was a regular contributor. Last year, an elbow injury cost him multiple months of time, and a crowded Orioles bench limited his opportunities. He posted an abysmal 33 wRC+ in just 83 plate appearances in his last year before free agency, which explains why he was on the market with no obvious suitors in mid-January.

That package doesn’t sound like a good starter for a playoff team, but here’s the good news: That’s not what the Braves are looking for. Come June, they’re hoping to slot Kim in as their starter at shortstop. They don’t have a ton of places to play Mateo after Kim returns, but uh… that’ll be just fine with them. Their lineup and bench both looked fairly set before Kim’s injury; no plan survives contact with the regular season, but if Kim returns in good health, they have plenty of help elsewhere, so DFA’ing Mateo and losing him on waivers would hardly be the end of the world.

If Kim were out for the entire season, I wouldn’t like this solution very much at all. Mateo can’t hit – and there’s some chance that he really can’t hit. But playing a reasonable major league defender at shortstop is very important, and hiding that defender’s bat in the nine hole is a valid response if the offense is really that bad. Heck, the Braves gave Allen a ton of run last year with a 53 wRC+; two months of Mateo’s projected 73 wRC+ is way better. What’s more, having both Dubón and Mateo under contract means that if one of them looks either much worse or much better than the other, the team has options. I don’t think Dubón can handle shortstop every day, but I’m not certain of that assessment, and likewise, I’m not certain that Mateo can. But can one of them handle it for two months? Surely.

Is this a good situation for the Braves? Obviously not. But I give them a lot of credit for making the best of some bad news. “Dang, I wish we still had Nick Allen” is not a sentence you want your fans to be uttering, especially in January. But they got an Allen-like player for a bargain, and the guy they traded the real Allen for can help too. I’m sure that Braves fans are already ruing their fourth straight year of bad injury luck, but you can’t control who gets hurt, only how you respond to it, and I think that Atlanta’s roster is now well-positioned to blunt the damage that Kim’s absence might inflict.