Ha-Seong Kim reached 85 plate appearances on August 15, and the number only underlined how far his season has fallen. The 30-year-old, now with the Atlanta Braves, entered that day with a.231 OPS, a line so poor that his offensive production is being measured against some of the worst in the sport’s history for hitters with at least that many trips to the plate.
That is the kind of search traffic Kim invites now because the contrast is impossible to miss. Not long ago, he had back-to-back five-bWAR seasons in San Diego, won a Gold Glove Award in 2023 and even picked up MVP votes that same year. He dipped a little in 2024 and was still an above-average player with the San Diego Padres, which is why his collapse this season reads less like a slump than a full undoing.
On August 15, Kim went 0-for-1 against the Arizona Diamondbacks and his season OPS dropped to.231. He has only five hits in 31 games, all of them singles, and his batting average never got above.167 at any point this season. His strikeout rate is above 30 percent and has become a career-worst, which helps explain why the numbers look so extreme even after only 85 plate appearances.
There is still an unanswered piece to this wreckage. A.J. Preller’s interest in keeping Kim long-term had already been cooled by shoulder surgery, but the current collapse is so severe that the surgery alone does not explain all of it. Kim has been on the field more than 11 games since his hitless streak began on June 3, yet he did not log a plate appearance in some of those outings, a strange detail that leaves the full shape of the decline harder to pin down. What is clear is that a $20 million season has turned into a nightmare, and for San Diego, the case for moving on looks better every day.
The question now is not whether Kim has been bad. It is whether anything in the rest of this season can restore even a fraction of the player who once looked like a reliable, above-average regular in San Diego.
