Fernando Tatis Jr. had gone 36 games into the Padres’ season and still had not hit his first home run. The 27-year-old entered Wednesday with six extra-base hits in 148 plate appearances, a strange line for a player who has spent much of his career punishing mistakes in the air.
Through his first 34 games, Tatis was slashing.250/.320/.305 with 12 barrels, yet the ball kept finding gloves instead of seats. He had a.337 BABIP, his highest since his rookie season, while pulling the ball 20.8% of the time, hitting it up the middle 46.9% of the time and using the opposite field on 32.3% of his batted balls. He ranked in the 99th percentile in hard-hit rate and carried a.280 expected batting average, which ranked in the 82nd percentile.
The numbers say the power outage has not come from a lack of authority. Tatis had hit the ball harder than almost anyone, but the shape of his contact has changed. He has a career-high 52.1% groundball rate this season, along with a 28.1% line drive rate that is the best of his career. He trimmed his pop-up rate to 3.1%, but he was lifting the ball at just a 16.7% clip and pulling the ball in the air at a career-low 5.2% rate.
That makes this stretch look less like a collapse than a shift. Since his 42-homer season in 2021, Tatis has hit exactly 25 home runs in his two full seasons during that span. Injuries and an 80-game PED suspension wiped out his 2022 season, and a stress fracture in his leg cost him two months in 2024. Even then, he still hit 21 home runs in 102 games and posted a wRC+ above 130 in each of the past two seasons.
The friction point is obvious: the quality of the contact is there, but the launch angle is not. Heading into Wednesday, Tatis was slugging.305, nearly 200 points below his career mark, and the Padres were still waiting for the first swing that matched the underlying data. Luis Rengifo had the second-most barrels without a home run at six, and last season Jose Tena led that odd category with six.
For now, the story around Tatis is not whether he is hitting. It is whether the Padres can keep waiting for the hard contact to turn into the kind of home run pace that once made him one of the sport’s most dangerous hitters.
