Baseball is the only sport that regularly produces the following thought in my head: Does everyone who is good at baseball actually kind of suck at baseball? The existence of Shohei Ohtani makes it impossible to ever answer with a definitive “yes,” but the question lingers still.
Related to this matter is the plight of Fernando Tatis Jr. Not so long ago, he was a young Padres shortstop showing signs of becoming the best player in the league. He produced 6.7 bWAR across 143 games in his first two seasons, and then broke out in year three with 42 homers, a .975 OPS, and 6.6 bWAR. But then, oops, he got suspended for taking PEDs and missed the entirety of the 2022 season. Since then, he’s remained a highly productive if slightly less powerful player in the seasons. He hasn’t hit more than 25 homers in a season since his suspension, but he played 155 games last year and finished with 6.1 bWAR.
Twenty-five homers is significantly fewer than 42, but it is also not a small enough number to have signaled that Tatis would start the 2026 MLB season swinging a damn noodle bat. Coming into Saturday’s game against the Nationals, Tatis had gone 55 games without hitting a homer, and was in the midst of the longest homer-less streak (238 plate appearances) of any player in the league. That humiliating streak mercifully ended yesterday when he clobbered a pitch 451 feet into the left-field seats.
As far as slump-busting homers go, you can do a lot worse than this one. A puny flick down the line that just barely cleared the fence might have just further underscored how limp Tatis’s swing has been this year, but a big boomer like this one can be read as a signal that the younger, stronger version of Tatis is still in there somewhere.
Tatis still has a long way to go. His power drought does not seem to be the result of any particularly harsh batted-ball luck. There are signs of hope in his hard-hit rate and bat speed, which still rank near the top of the league according to Statcast, but things get more perplexing the further down the pile of numbers you go. Tatis is currently sporting a career-high line-drive rate (good!) but also hitting a career-high percentage of ground balls (bad!). Most worrying is how few pitches he’s hitting hard: His average exit velocity is currently a career low, and almost 4 mph lower than last year’s mark. He’s also never been this bad at pulling the ball, which is not a thing you want from a pull-side hitter who should be entering his prime.
The good news for Tatis is that the Padres have not sunk too far while he’s been confined to the yard. They are just 4.5 games back of the Dodgers for the division lead, and could conceivably make up quite a bit of ground of Tatis’s bat starts firing. Here’s hoping it does, because the National League is a lot more fun when the Dodgers-Padres rivalry heats up, and it would be a shame to see it fizzle this year because Tatis forgot how to hit dingers.
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