Fernando Tatis Jr.’s Uneven Return From a Lost Season

The Padres continue to sputter along, below .500 (27-32) and outside the playoff picture. While Juan Soto has heated up, Manny Machado has extended the slump that he was in before landing on the injured list with a fractured metacarpal, and Xander Bogaerts has underperformed while playing through a lingering wrist issue for the past month. As for Fernando Tatis Jr., he’s returned from a lost season that included a wrist fracture and an 80-game suspension for using a banned substance, and while he’s been one of the Padres’ most productive hitters, his performance has been uneven, well short of his superstar-level showings from 2019-21.

The circumstances surrounding Tatis’ left wrist fracture have yet to be clarified fully, in part because he could not communicate with the Padres during the lockout, but he’s believed to have suffered the injury during one of the multiple (!) motorcycle accidents he was involved in while in the Dominican Republic during the 2021-22 offseason. He apparently did not start feeling the effects of the injury until he began taking swings in mid-February in preparation for spring training, but only after the lockout ended did the team discover the injury. He underwent surgery to repair his scaphoid bone on March 16, and his recovery took longer than expected. Four games into his rehab stint, Major League Baseball announced that he had incurred an 80-game suspension for testing positive for Clostebol, an anabolic steroid prohibited under the league’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, a shock and disappointment given both his growing stature within the game and the tantalizing possibility of him joining a revamped Padres lineup.

Tatis’ suspension ran through the Padres’ final 48 regular season games, their 12-game postseason run (during which they reached the National League Championship Series after upsetting both the 101-win Mets and 111-win Dodgers), and their first 20 games of this season. When he took the field on April 20, in the Padres’ 21st game, he was 18 1/2 months removed from his last regular season major league game. That’s a substantial slice of time in a 24-year-old player’s life.

Tatis went 0-for-5 with a pair of strikeouts in his first game back, then ran off a nine-game hitting streak during which he went 14-for-41. Since then, he’s largely leveled off, with multi-hit games here, 0-fers there, and lately, a burst of power. After hitting three doubles and driving in four runs last Thursday against the Marlins, Tatis bashed two homers on Saturday against the Cubs, bringing his total to 11 on the season, including six within a 14-game span. He hit a pair against the Red Sox on May 19 and 20, and another pair against the Yankees on May 26 and 27. Some of those shots have come against big-name pitchers, though to be fair James Paxton, Chris Sale, and Luis Severino aren’t who they used to be.

I was at Yankee Stadium for Tatis’ May 26 homer off Ron Marinaccio. In my section just to the third base side of home plate, it was immediately preceded by a lone voice shouting, “Cheater!” — with similar jeers elsewhere — and Tatis’ response was particularly emphatic. His 113.4-mph drive was the fastest ball off his bat since his return, and at 439 feet, it had the second-longest projected distance. While Tatis had performed the usual rite of public contrition when he was suspended — a ritual that like so many other PED-related ones included a rather dubious explanation (a medication to treat ringworm that contained Clostebol?) — he has rolled with the notoriety while humoring the boo-birds that have greeted him in visiting ballparks. Here he is dancing at Wrigley Field after being serenaded with a “He’s on steroids!” chant on April 26:

Fernando Tatis Jr. just dancing through the “he’s on steroids” heckling at Wrigley ? pic.twitter.com/F58JQwhHE6

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— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) April 26, 2023

And here he is playing conductor to a symphony of disapproving Yankee Stadium fans on May 26:

Tatis had Yankees fans in tears tonight pic.twitter.com/XSIvRt71ak

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) May 27, 2023

At least in the annals of baseball, I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a player react quite like this upon returning from a PED-related suspension. We’re a long way from Rafael Palmeiro stuffing wads of cotton in his ears in a futile attempt to drown out the boos following his return from a suspension in 2005, though that probably owed something to the man’s self-righteous finger-pointing during his Congressional testimony just months earlier. Perhaps Tatis is reacting this way because he still has the financial security of his 14-year, $340 million contract, and a long time in the public spotlight ahead of him. Or perhaps he just doesn’t fit the stereotype of the combative and paranoid PED user who seems to be at war with just about everyone else within the game — our collective projection of Barry Bonds, who was never actually suspended but spent the last half-decade of his career in the shadow of the BALCO investigation and in a joyless pursuit of Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record.

This is, at the very least, more fun than that, which isn’t to condone Tatis’ use of a banned substance or dismiss the frustration and sadness brought about by his suspension. But now that he’s back and playing, it seems far better that he’s resumed displaying his irrepressible joie de vivre than carrying out some extended, performative sulking. I can only imagine that the people most annoyed by his current comportment are the same ones who would rather fight a culture war — or at the very least incite a beanball war — than admit to enjoying a bat flip.

“I just embrace it,” Tatis said of his reception at Yankee Stadium. “There’s times that you can give a little bit back to the fans. There are times that, depends on the game, you just need to focus and lock it in. This game belongs to the fans, and it’s just good to give a good show out there.”

As for his actual performance, Tatis is hitting .263/.311/.509. On the one hand, that’s pretty solid for a guy who missed a full season and underwent surgeries not only on his left wrist but also the torn labrum in his left shoulder. He sustained at least four subluxations of the joint that caused him to miss games in 2021, and the suspension allowed him a longer time to recover. On the other hand, while Tatis’ 123 wRC+ is second on the Padres behind Soto’s 151, it’s a far cry from the 157 he put up in 2021 while batting .282/.364/.611 with an NL-high 42 homers, or the 153 mark he owned for his career entering this season.

As you might suspect, Tatis isn’t hitting the ball as hard as he did prior to his surgeries and suspension:

While it’s true that Tatis has played only 39 games since returning, just under a quarter of a season, we’re not talking about a small sample anymore, given that exit velocity starts to stabilize around 40 batted ball events, barrel rate around 50, and hard-hit rate around 80. Tatis’ average exit velocity is down by a full three ticks. If we place that in the context of year-to-year drops — as in, with no lost seasons — that turns out to be somewhat rare. Only 10 players with at least 300 PA in 2021 and 150 in ’22 had drop-offs of that magnitude or higher, and only six have had larger ones from ’22 to ’23. Nobody in that window has a larger year-to-year drop in barrel rate:

In fact, given those PA cutoffs, I found only one player in the entire Statcast era whose year-to-year decline even came close: Aaron Judge, who fell from 24.9% in his monster rookie campaign in 2017 to a still-impressive 15.4% the next year. While that represented a 9.5-point dive, Judge merely fell from the 100th percentile to the 98th. Like Judge, Tatis at least has had the cushion to fall off from a great height and remain exceptional; in his case, he’s dropped from the 99th percentile to the 78th in terms of barrel rate, from the 98th to the 76th in average exit velocity, and from the 98th to the 68th in hard-hit rate. And of course he has good reason, given the layoff and particularly the labrum surgery.

I’d be overstating the case if I said that Tatis’ rolling exit velocities, hard-hit rates, and xSLGs on a 50- or 75-batted ball basis suggest that he’s trending in the right direction; I could show you a plot that makes the case that he is…

…and another that suggests he’s not:

Baseball Savant doesn’t offer rolling barrel rates, and I’m not about to crunch this all by hand, but what I can tell you is that if we divide his season up into thirds, we do see some positive movement in terms of barrel rate and maximum exit velocity:

Note the decrease in launch angle, however. Tatis is hitting the ball on the ground more often than in 2021 (44.2% vs. 40.2%) but less often than in ’20 or ’19. On that note, he’s pulling the ball a bit less often than in 2021 (46.5% vs. 48%) but more often than in ’20 or ’19 — all of which is to say that relative to recent years, his batted balls are pretty similar in terms of placement. Where they differ dramatically is the amount of carry he’s getting on fly balls:

Oof. Some of that decline may owe to a deader baseball — the league-wide average fly ball distance has dropped from 318 feet in 2021 to 315 feet this year — but even if we account for that, Tatis has gone from hitting flies that average 36 feet more carry relative to the league to ones that average four feet less, a swing of 40 feet. Even limiting the league-wide data to early-season rates (317 feet in 2021, 313 this year) doesn’t mitigate that much.

Beyond what’s happening when Tatis makes contact, there’s what’s happening when he isn’t. He’s swinging at more pitches than ever, by a lot, but most of that is due to pitches in the strike zone, of which he’s seeing a higher percentage:

Tatis is chasing slightly more pitches, but I don’t think this fits the usual pattern of elevated swing and chase rates that might be considered pressing, particularly as he’s swinging and missing less often; as you can see, he’s cut both his walk and strikeout rates, the latter by a wide margin. Where he’s really struggling is when he makes contact while chasing; he hit .118 and slugged .221 with an average exit velo of 84.9 mph in 2021 — already pretty bad — but is now down to .085 AVG/.106 SLG while averaging 76 mph. Yikes.

Pitch type-wise, Tatis is whiffing more against four-seamers relative to 2021 (31.3% vs. 27.6%) but he’s also slugging .833 (up from .761) and is above-average against them in Statcast run values, if not at the same rate (2.2 runs per 100, down from 2.9). He’s been feasting on sliders, which represent a big part of his diet (19.3%), but scuffling against cutters, which are comparatively rare (8.2%).

On the defensive side, there is some good news, as Tatis’ transition to full-time outfield play couldn’t be going much better based upon the metrics. While keeping in mind that the samples are still small, his numbers as a right fielder are elite, largely owing to his range: 9 DRS, 4.9 UZR, 4 OAA. The last of those leads all right fielders, while the DRS is second and the UZR third. Via Statcast, not only is his OAA in the 95th percentile among all outfielders, his jumps are in the 98th, his arm strength in the 99th. Particularly when one considers that his numbers at shortstop were at best a mixed bag (-6 DRS, -7.5 UZR, 2 OAA in 2021), the move does seem to be paying off without costing him value.

Taken together, Tatis’ offensive and defensive numbers carry some good news and bad, that after he’s played roughly a quarter-season following a full-year layoff. I don’t know that we’ll ever see the remarkable thumper we saw circa 2021, but I would hardly rule it out entirely given his age and the possibility that more time to recover from his shoulder surgery and perhaps address his mechanics could prove beneficial. Even spotting the field the first 20 games of the season, he ranks 23rd in the NL in WAR at 1.5, a pace of 5.4 per 650 PA. That’s still star-level, and he remains an exceptional player, as well as an exciting one. While his presence and performance won’t solve all of the Padres’ current problems, and while he won’t win back every fan he lost due to his foolishness and his suspension, the game is better for his return.