It’s my first post since the MLB Trade Deadline, and everything is shaping up the way it was supposed to all along. Buyers are struggling, sellers are cruising, and vice versa. In other words, chaos! But perhaps the constant that is still shocking to most baseball fans is the disappointing season of the San Diego Padres. Voices across the Twitter-verse (or Planet X, I guess) begged their teams to trade for Juan Soto, even though, in hindsight, Padres GM AJ Preller would never admit defeat in that capacity. But it’s not too late for the Padres to start evaluating their future in the form of concocting trades for the 2023-2024 offseason involving their second baseman, Ha-Seong Kim. Let's talk about why they might do that.
The reason why the Padres should be trading at least some of the assets that made them as hyped as they were in Spring Training is because they’re an extremely star-studded, top-heavy team with a lack of depth that acts as a black hole for starting rallies throughout a game. It also doesn’t help that Blake Snell and Josh Hader, arguably the two best pitchers on San Diego's roster, will be free agents at the end of the year. The Padres dealt a lot of their farm system depth that they spent such an ordeal building in the first place in various trades over the past few years, namely in the Juan Soto-Josh Bell trade in 2022, and to top it off, Xander Boegarts, Jake Cronenworth and Manny Machado aren’t living up to their fresh long-term contracts. With all the money they have committed, retooling what they need to could be a daunting task, but a great place to start would be to exchange the hot value of one of baseball’s best utility infielders for some much needed plugs in all corners of the Major League roster.
While Ha-Seong Kim made noise when he signed in San Diego at the height of their rebuild out of the KBO, he didn’t make as much noise as some of his other Asian-born counterparts have over the years in his first two years in Major League Baseball. But this year, Kim has become one of baseball’s most underrated stars. His average is up to .290 for the season, and even though he doesn’t hit the ball hard, his .837 OPS and 134 OPS+ both rank well-above his previous season highs. Kim has also shown off a lot of speed, stealing 27 bases, good for ninth in baseball, and continues to play solid defense at multiple positions (mainly at second base in 2023, but has spent plenty of time at SS and 3B in previous seasons). For you WAR-heads out there, and to put some context to how good of an all-around season Kim is having, Kim’s 4.5 fWAR ranks eighth in all of baseball in 2023.
Looking closer at Kim’s hitting numbers raises some funny points as to how a player might improve season-over-season. His Baseball Savant page shows that he is quite consistent against the three generic pitch types (fastballs, breaking balls, and off-speed pitches), and his FanGraphs page shows that the only thing that’s changed about his hitting approach this year is that he’s swinging less at both pitches in and out of the zone. There is no player this season that demonstrates the idea that limiting negative outcomes can improve the likelihood of your positive outcomes more than Kim. Like I said before, he does not hit the ball hard, but he does so many other things right that his offense is blossoming, which compliments his already-above-average speed and fielding tools.
Kim’s utility across the diamond and his little-but-big change in approach at the plate (plus his increase in stealing from the new rule changes) make him a great trade candidate for the Padres to flip for prospects to hopefully slow down the inevitable aging of the stars they’re already committed to paying the big bucks. While Kim is under contract in SoCal for at least three more seasons after 2023, I wouldn’t be surprised to see AJ Preller capitalize on the success of the Padres’ odd-man out money-wise. Or better yet, just flip him for Gleyber Torres and Trey Sweeny (or something, I don’t know, could be cool, AJ).
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