Fernando Tatis Jr.’s Homerless Drought Has Ended

On Saturday in San Diego, Fernando Tatis Jr. homered against the Royals, a towering shot that gave the slugger a moment to admire his work and stylishly set down his bat before trotting around the bases. Beyond that flourish, it was a timely hit, as the three-run, seventh-inning blast expanded a 2-1 lead and helped the Padres to a much-needed victory. Of particular interest to these eyes — and no doubt to those of Padres fans — was the fact that the homer was Tatis’ first since May 27, ending the longest drought of his career.

The 26-year-old slugger connected against a 96-mph sinker from the Royals’ Taylor Clarke. It came off the bat at 107.9 mph, but its estimated distance was a modest 380 feet:

“It was heavy,” Tatis said of his 21-game homerless streak. “Everybody knew it, I knew it, how long it was. I’ve just been grinding.”

Tatis’ effort to resume hitting dingers wasn’t helped by his being hit by a pitch three times within a 10-day span against the Dodgers, part of ongoing hostilities between the two NL West rivals. In the last of those, Dodgers reliever Jack Little — who was making his major league debut — hit Tatis on the right wrist in the ninth inning of their June 19 game. Both benches and bullpens cleared, and managers Mike Shildt and Dave Roberts had to be separated:

Both managers earned one-game suspensions and fines, while Padres reliever Robert Suarez, who hit Shohei Ohtani in the bottom of the ninth — the second time in the series both superstars were plunked within the same frame — was handed a three-game suspension. Tatis had to leave the game and undergo X-rays and follow-up scans that, thankfully, revealed he didn’t break any bones (the Diamondbacks’ Corbin Carroll wasn’t so lucky with respect to his recent HBP).

“For me it wasn’t [intentional], in the moment,” said Tatis afterwards. “But how many times have they hit me already?” He later said he spent a “long morning at the hospital” but that he “definitely dodged a bullet.”

“It got the bones on my wrist. That’s a delicate area,” he continued. “I was just happy I didn’t break any bones and happy I’m able to stay on the field.”

Back to the home runs, in his six-season career, Tatis had never gone more than 18 games without hitting one until this season, though he did have another comparatively long streak in late April and early May:

A 21-game homerless streak isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. Nico Hoerner has yet to homer in 74 games played this year, and it’s not hard to find former All-Stars with 30-homer seasons on their résumés and streaks longer than that of Tatis this year, including Michael Conforto (41 games), Freddie Freeman (36 and counting), Joc Pederson (33), Salvador Perez (31), Gleyber Torres (28), and Paul Goldschmidt (27). Padres teammate Xander Bogaerts has separate homerless streaks of 30 and 28 games himself, the longer of which ended in the same game from which Tatis departed.

Including another three-run shot hit with two outs in the ninth inning of Monday night’s 10-6 loss to the Nationals, Tatis has hit a team-high 15 homers, but his total is quite front-loaded and clustered. He clubbed eight in his first 21 games, went homerless for the next 14, rebounded with four homers in eight games, hit one over a 29-game span that included the long drought, and has now gone yard twice in the last three games. Through all of that, his production is more or less in line with last year’s, albeit with improved strikeout and walk rates, a lower BABIP and ISO, and better defensive metrics such that he’s already surpassed last year’s WAR:

Tatis has been hitting the ball hard, but hasn’t been getting the positive results one would expect from his quality of contact. Here’s a look at his monthly breakdown in some traditional and Statcast categories:

Tatis was red-hot in March and April, but even then, he was 78 points short of his expected slugging percentage, and that was with an average launch angle of just three degrees; he had a 54.7% groundball rate that month (more on that topic momentarily). He was frosty in May, but has made better contact in June; even so, the gap between his actual and expected slugging percentage has almost doubled. Such gaps aren’t uncommon, particularly for those who toil in offense-suppressing Petco Park; this year, the league as a whole is slugging .369 there, compared to an xSLG of .408. Tatis hit .237/.383/.289 in the 21 games bracketed by his past two homers, but produced a .275 xBA and .420 xSLG over that stretch.

For as hard as Tatis is hitting the ball — his 93.8-mph average exit velo is in the 96th percentile, and his 52.6% hard-hit rate in the 92nd percentile — his 12.4% barrel rate is only in the 74th percentile, down from the 92nd percentile last year (14.5%). That goes hand in hand with his spike to a career-high 50.4% groundball rate, up over four percentage points from last year:

There’s a lot going on in that table. Note first that on a seasonal basis, Tatis is hitting more grounders than in recent years, and pulling the ball less often, particularly in the air. Recently, he’s cut down his groundball rate, but has offset that in part by hitting more popups, and is pulling the ball with even less frequency. The problem with that is that balls in the air are less likely to get out if they’re hit straightaway — to the deepest part of the ballpark — than if they’re hit towards a corner.

Tatis is notorious for tinkering with his setup and his stance. Here’s a still from a multi-screen Instagram post from MLB Network on April 14:

If you follow the link to that post, you’ll see clips of MLBN analyst Mark DeRosa pointing out how Tatis has increasingly opened his stance over the course of his career, how he’s wrapping the bat more relative to last season, and how he’s gotten rid of a leg kick… but this clip aired two months and two homerless droughts ago. “If he goes south, don’t be shocked if you see the leg kick surface in July when he’s not feeling great,” said DeRosa, whose timing was off by a couple of months. Tatis appears to have brought a kick back after that first homerless spell; here’s a supercut of his previous five homers from May 10–27:

The kick is there, albeit less so for the last of those homers, but it was absent for Monday night’s 435-footer off Washington’s Zach Brzykcy:

A comparison of Tatis’ batting stance data for the three seasons we have available shows him progressing from a stance that was open by 14 degrees (late 2023) to open by 29 degrees (2024) to open by 45 degrees, but within those seasons, there’s some variation. In July 2023, his stance was open by 16 degrees, but by September/October that was down to 11 degrees. Last year, he ranged from being open by 27 degrees in May to 31 degrees both in June before being sidelined by a stress reaction in his right femur and in September after returning. This year, Tatis has gone from a stance that was open by 52 degrees in March/April to 45 degrees in May to 35 degrees in June, with the distance between his feet increasing from 20.9 inches to 22.6 to 24.9:

Relative to last year, Tatis’ average bat speed is down (from 74.7 mph to 73.6), and his attack angle has flattened out (from 10 degrees to seven), but on a monthly basis, his speed and angle have increased, while his tilt has decreased and his attack direction has shifted:

That’s more than I can account for at this early stage of understanding swing tracking, but in reading a recent article in which Baseball Prospectus’ Matthew Trueblood aggregated attack angles and attack directions into 36 different buckets, I noticed that Tatis’ average combination (attack angle 5-10 degrees, slight oppo direction) lands him in the bucket with one of the lowest wOBAs (.250):

A closer look at the data shows that when Tatis — whose attack angle on all of his swings this year has ranged from 30 degrees to -74, a good reminder that these are averages we’re discussing — has swung at balls within that 5–10 degree attack angle range, his production this year is way down relative to the past two:

Within that narrow range of angles, Tatis has hit grounders on 45.3% of his balls in play, consistent with 2023 but way up from 33.8% last year, and with worse results (.092 wOBA vs. .210 wOBA) despite a much higher average exit velocity (93 mph vs. 88.7).

I’m reluctant to get too much more granular at this stage, but given what we’ve observed with his stance, his kick, and the angles in play, I think it’s fair to say that Tatis is still searching for a more optimal swing, in part because his results aren’t jibing with the quality of his contact. What he’s got is still working better than most players — he’s 17th in the league in wRC+, and fifth in WAR — but like any star, he’s driven to improve, and that’s part of what makes him great.