Padres' Fernando Tatis Jr. Is, Once Again, One of the Best Players In Baseball

[Randy Holt]

Between the end of the 2025 season and into 2026, Fernando Tatis Jr. went 56 games without hitting a home run. That's nearly 240 times that he stepped to the plate and came away without maximizing the output his skill set indicates should have been there all along. And as the San Diego Padres struggled to find consistent offense, there were legitimate concerns over what his performance could look like extrapolated over a full 162-game slate. 

Fortunately, Tatis was doing a lot of other things really well. Through the end of May, wRC+ still had him as a below-average hitter (89), but his .266 batting average and .340 on-base percentage, along with a 9.8 percent walk rate. still read as entirely reasonable figures. Without the power element, though, there was an absence of impact from one of the lineup's most essential bats. Compound it with the broader struggles from each of Jackson Merrill & Manny Machado, and the Padres had a real problem on their hands. 

Then we hit the start of June. 

It's not just that Tatis' home run power began to manifest more frequently that month—after his first homer on May 30, he was able to add four more in June—it's that the power, in a general sense, began to appear at a much higher rate than we'd seen in some time. In addition to the four homers, he added nine doubles, which exceeded his total of six from the two previous months combined. He did it again in July, when he added three more home runs and seven more doubles (as well as his second triple of the year). 

When you combine the power, whether in the gap sense or the over-the-outfield-wall sense, with everything else that was going well at the plate, you get the most fully-formed iteration of Fernando Tatis Jr. that we've come to expect. It's left him with a percentile distribution that looks like this in the middle of August:

Despite a couple of underlying things that you'd, in an ideal world, like to see improved, that's a setup that has the look of an elite hitter. A ton of hard contact and expected stats indicative of a player feeling good at the plate. What is perhaps most notable about his rise in production since the start of June, however, is how it's left him looking up against his peers across Major League Baseball.

Since June 1, Tatis Jr ranks eighth in fWAR among position players at 2.8. His average and on-base percentage each rank in the top 30 of a group that features more than 160 names, while his isolated power (.233) ranks 27th. While that may not be an overly impressive figure in a vacuum, it's still miles ahead from where we saw him earlier in the year. Sitting above the actual production, though, is the fact that only four players carry a hard-hit rate higher than Tatis Jr's 53.7 percent clip in the two-and-a-half-month span. Factor in the increase in flyball contact he's experienced this summer, and you have a player much more capable of providing impact than the mechanically flawed edition we saw earlier in the year. 

That Fernando Tatis Jr. has ascended not only in terms of his own production, but within the context of his positional counterparts throughout the league, is a welcome sight on its own. A player with that level of upside is one you simply want to see perform at a high level. For the Padres, though, it's been a crucial development. His progression since that early season slog has correlated almost directly with the team's collective run production; since the start of June, the Padres are 15th in runs scored and rank in the top 10 in virtually every other offensive category. 

Not that he's doing on its own, but it speaks to Tatis' overall impact that the two are aligned as closely as they are. So long as he keeps performing like a superstar, the Padres are as well-positioned as they've been all year to make a legitimate wild-card push in the National League.

View full article