Losing a bidding war for a free agent always hurts. But it especially hurts when you lose to a team that doesn’t even need the guy. And vis-\u00e0-vis Hyeseong Kim and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Seattle Mariners know this all too well.<\/p>\n
Though Kim batted .407 this spring in his bid to be the Dodgers’ everyday second baseman, the two-time defending World Series champions still optioned him to the minors anyway<\/a>. It had something to do with strikeouts, which [looks and sees eight strikeouts in 27 at-bats], OK, fair enough.<\/p>\n Even so, is it fair for the Mariners to look at the Dodgers and see them wasting a perfectly good infielder? <\/p>\n Let’s just assume it is. After all, the Mariners were reportedly a finalist for Kim last winter<\/a> before he landed with Los Angeles on a three-year, $12.5 million contract. And whereas he’s mostly been a spare part for the Dodgers, it doesn’t take huge imaginative leaps to see how he could be a key player on Seattle’s roster right now.<\/p>\n Mariners left to wonder ‘What if?’ as Dodgers keep Hyeseong Kim on the sidelines<\/p>\n That the Mariners were interested in Kim during the 2024-25 offseason came as no surprise. He was a .304 career hitter and four-time Gold Glove winner, and his primary position was a clear need for Seattle at the time.<\/p>\n Second base was meant to be a strength for the Mariners<\/a> in 2024, but Jorge Polanco’s down year scrambled those plans. The position yielded a .658 OPS and 2.2 rWAR.<\/p>\n Granted, Seattle’s eventual reunion with Polanco paid off to the tune of a 134 OPS+ in the regular season and a series of heroic moments in the playoffs<\/a>. But he wasn’t so much the answer at the keystone as the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option after Ryan Bliss got hurt and Cole Young failed to establish himself.<\/p>\n Albeit with no power, Kim hit .280, stole 13 bases and racked up nine Defensive Runs Saved in 71 games with the Dodgers. That kind of production would have made a real difference in Seattle, where second base somehow regressed to 1.4 rWAR in 2025.<\/p>\n Even now, with Young finding his stroke in a major way this spring<\/a>, the Mariners could still use Kim. He has more versatility and upside as a super-utility guy than Bliss and Leo Rivas, and he’d be the perfect emergency stand-in for J.P. Crawford if his shoulder keeps him off the Opening Day roster<\/a>.<\/p>\n Granted, maybe all this sounds like a mix of sour grapes and Dodgers Derangement Syndrome. And in all fairness, it is exactly that.<\/p>\n It’s nice to have nice things, though. And when another team has more nice things than it knows what to do with, envy becomes not just valid, but unavoidable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Losing a bidding war for a free agent always hurts. But it especially hurts when you lose to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2392],"tags":[5,620,4,619,65,3235],"class_list":{"0":"post-640645","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seattle-mariners","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mariners","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-seattle","12":"tag-seattle-mariners","13":"tag-seattlemariners"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116284242257798298","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}