The Los Angeles Dodgers chose Alex Thomas from Triple-A instead of Hyeseong Kim after placing Andy Paredes on the injured list on July 23 Korean time. The move came after Paredes fractured his wrist when a 100 mph fastball struck the back of his hand against the Pittsburgh Pirates a day earlier.
That roster opening mattered because Kim had been viewed as a possible replacement. He had the kind of positional flexibility that can matter in a short-handed roster, having played center field in 13 games and left field in 3 games in his minor league career, but the Dodgers still went with Thomas, who had 449 major league games behind him and a stronger current minor league line.
Kim's search for a call-up was already tied to what he was doing at the plate. On July 22, he started as the sixth hitter and second baseman in a minor league game and went hitless in five at-bats, leaving his season batting average at 0.256 and his OPS at 0.669. That was before August made the case against him even harder to ignore.
Excluding the game on the 23rd, Kim hit 0.169 in August with 11 hits in 65 at-bats, and his OPS in that stretch was 0.555. In 55 minor league games this season, Thomas hit.296 with seven home runs and an OPS of 0.855, a cleaner answer for a Dodgers club that had to fill the opening immediately rather than wait for upside to arrive.
The friction is in what the opportunity said about Kim and what the Dodgers did with it. Local circles had viewed him as a strong replacement candidate because of his utility value, but his August slump gave the club a reason to look elsewhere. Starting in September, when the major league roster expands from 26 to 28 players, that calculation could change again, but for now Hyeseong Kim is still waiting while Thomas gets the next look.
