Atlanta Braves fans were thrilled to learn that the team was reuniting with Ha-Seong Kim on a one year deal. The Braves were certainly talking tough beforehand in saying that they were very comfortable with the newly acquired Mauricio Dubon playing short every day, no one was excited about the idea. Now that Kim is back in the fold, this Atlanta squad looks like they are in really good shape heading into 2026.
Things almost didn't happen that way. ESPN's Jeff Passan previously reported when the signing went down that Kim turned down multi-year deals to sign with the Braves, but most reasonable thought that he was just betting on himself instead of taking a two or three year deal at a lower AAV.
However, things have gotten even more interesting after some reporting from The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal. According to Rosenthal's report, the Athletics had a four-year deal on the table for Kim and that feels awfully close to what it would have taken to lock him up and steal him from Atlanta.
Ha-Seong Kim turned down four-year deal to return to the Braves, but the devil is in the details
For the optimists out there, this is a pretty glowing endorsement of the Braves. By all accounts, Kim really enjoyed his time in Atlanta and the fact that he left a (roughly) four-year, $48 million deal on the table to take less than half guaranteed money from the Braves is proof of that.
However, there is probably more to it than that. The A's are in a group of teams that are under a magnifying glass because they don't spend enough of their revenue sharing dollars. In expressing real interest in Kim and making sure the details of their offer to Kim were publicly known, they can argue that they tried to spend and then complain about their position as a lower revenue team more during the upcoming CBA negotiations. It also probably didn't help their cause with Kim that the team isn't all that good and the organization itself is famously cheap when it comes to amenities for players.
In the end, the Braves played their hand with Kim absolutely perfectly. They knew how Scott Boras thinks and made sure to keep a fairly lucrative one year deal on the table for Kim. Once Kim didn't find a deal to his liking, Atlanta was there to scoop him up. That said, it is a little surprising that the A's went as far as they did in their pursuit of Kim and they (probably) almost pulled it off.