Fernando Tatis Jr. would like nothing more than to put a ball over the fence like Ty France did — on a 110 mph line — in the fifth inning at Petco Park.
One day. Definitely. Maybe.
On Saturday, a ball finding a patch of grass sufficed.
Tatis followed France’s game-tying homer with a soft go-ahead hit, Randy Vásquez turned in another strong effort, Manny Machado added an eighth-inning insurance homer and Mason Miller survived a wild ninth in the Padres’ 4-2 win over the St. Louis Cardinals in front of a sellout crowd of 41,559.
“Beautiful,” Tatis said. “Everybody was saying I definitely deserve it. Just happy that that one came through.”
Needed it, too.
It’s well documented that Tatis is in the longest home run drought to ever start a season. In fact, of the 100 players with 150 plate appearances, only he and the speedy Chandler Simpson are homerless. Tatis began the day ranking in the 98th percentile in hard-hit rate (58.7%) and in the 91st percentile in average exit velocity (92.8 mph), but both his groundball rate (52.9%) and average launch angle (2.8 degrees) are the worst of his career.
More than that, there’s no shortage of opinions about what’s vexing Tatis.
And he knows that, too.
“It’s baseball,” Tatis said. “We have like four or five hitting coaches on staff and we’ve got 2 million hitting coaches outside the ballpark or in the ballpark. So it’s part of it. That’s why everybody watches baseball. They want to talk about it. They want to see what’s going on. It’s part of this game.”
So too are hits like the one that put the Padres up for good on Saturday.
He struck out in his first at-bat, grounded out in his second and then followed France’s game-tying home run with a 69.4 mph flare to open a 3-1 lead.
“I’m sure it feels good,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said. “I think he’s got bigger goals than one two-out, two-RBI hit for the season. It’s just one of those things that gives you a little peace of mind that you’re going to get a hit every once in a while. And he got one. He was kind of owed that one.
“Been hitting the ball so hard all year, and he finally got a bleeder to fall in.”
The Padres have won seven of the eight games started by Vásquez, who rebounded from two sub-par starts (10⅔ IP, 8 ER) to throw five innings of one-run ball. He struck out six, threw 59 of his 94 pitches for strikes and allowed one run on six hits without walking a batter.
Vásquez had traffic in every inning but the fifth and nearly escaped the fourth inning without damage after inducing a double play after allowing back-to-back singles to Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman.
But Nathan Church lined a ball to right-center for a run-scoring double to put the pressure on a Padres team that hadn’t gotten a hit since Jackson Merrill’s fourth-inning single on Friday.
The scoreboard had shown for a few innings that the bouncer off JJ Wetherholt’s glove in the second inning was a hit, but the official scorer took if away from Xander Bogaerts by the time France had dug in for his fifth-inning at-bat.
The first pitch from Dustin May was then drilled just left of center, 405 feet from the plate, for the Padres’ first hit.
“I thought we were putting good at-bats together all game and they just weren’t falling for us,” France said. “Kind of just opened up the floodgates that inning. Continued to have good at-bats. Got a few of those to fall and it worked out in our favor.”
Indeed.
Sung-Mun Song followed with a walk, Freddy Fermin singled to center and a passed ball put runners on second and third for Tatis.
The ensuing swing on a low-and-away cutter left Tatis’ bat on a 69.4 mph, 40-degree arc bending away from a hard-charging Walker and toward the right-field foul line.
It dropped in front of Walker as Song and Fermin scored easily to give the Padres a 3-1 lead. Tatis rounded first base aggressively before retreating to first base with a go-ahead single a day after his error in right field led to a “Little League grand slam” that opened the floodgates in a 6-0 loss.
Tatis was not in the clubhouse after Friday’s loss but addressed the gaffe after Saturday’s win.
“Being aggressive with it and the ball was hit hard, and it skipped on me,” Tatis said. “Probably not going to see much of that in myself, but it’s going to be looping around for — I don’t know — I haven’t had one of those in like three years. Yeah, it’s baseball. Especially the time of it, it was not the best, but you have to stick with it and find a way to help the team.”
Machado’s eighth-inning homer — his 200th as a Padre — arrived after Miller fetched a groundball to strand Adrián Morejón’s runner on second base. Jeremiah Estrada and Jason Adam followed Vásquez with scoreless frames, but the Cardinals got to Morejón in the eighth with a hit-by-pitch and Ivan Herrera’s run-scoring double.
Morejón stayed in the game to get the left-handed Alec Burleson to ground out to short for the second out. Miller then came in and got a quick groundball from Walker, who is ninth in the majors with a .946 OPS.
Miller walked two in the ninth and even loaded the bases on a wild-pitch strikeout with two outs before striking out Wetherholt with a rare fourth strikeout of the inning.
“Just got to (go) right at guys, especially after Manny tacked on a run for me, too,” Miller said of his second four-out save and MLB-leading 12th save of the season. “You know, just straight ahead. You don’t want to put the tying run on base and even a little more than that. So just going out there and calming your mind and calming your body a little bit and just go right at guys. That’s been what’s been successful this year, and kind of got away from that today.
“And we see what happens when you’re not getting ahead of guys.”
