Padres right fielder has appeared for much of the season — and especially the past few weeks — to be the player he used to be
He started and stopped and started and stopped. He went away. He returned.“I know what I’m doing,” Tatis said. “I know what I’m doing to bring that feeling back from ‘21, from ‘19.”Manny Machado was asked this week what he has found most impressive about Tatis this season.
Tatis is 25 years old now. He made his big-league debut more than five seasons ago. He is more than a year removed from the surgeries and the suspension. He is in his second season as a right fielder. And by that time, he had hit 81 home runs, stole 52 bases and had a .291 batting average and .965 OPS. This was a combination of things no player had ever put together in their first 273 major league games.Oh, and he fell off a motorcycle at least once, fracturing his wrist, had surgery for that injury, and before he could come back was suspended for a failed PED test, then had another wrist surgery and shoulder surgery.Fernando Tatis Jr.
And what he is doing now — considering the interruptions and the reason for a big portion of that time away — is the only thing that really matters.“You know, ‘19 and ‘20 and ‘21, I was doing it because of pure talent, and I was showing up and just playing baseball,” Tatis said recently. “But then there’s a page that you need to cross over when you start playing this game for that long. People are gonna make adjustments on you. And then it’s your time to make an adjustment.
He began 2024 hot. He hit his sixth home run on April 19, 22 games and 95 plate appearances in. Then came a stretch of poor ball-in-play luck that led to pressing, which inevitably meant chasing pitches out of the zone, which led to those at-bats that appear hopeless piling on top of each other. “I had a good start, the first three weeks,” Tatis said. “And then I start hitting the ball to people. When that happens, you’re trying to get a little bit more because you hit a line drive to everybody, and you don’t want to keep doing that. And that’s when you get in trouble and you get from yourself. I definitely got lost a little bit. Thank God that I have the dad that I have. He came in at a clutch time, and we just went back to basics and going back to trusting myself.
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