Padres Daily: Fernando Tatis Jr. has gone backward

Good morning,

The two chances the Padres had last night to get back in a game and potentially take a series from the Dodgers quickly evaporated the same way.

"We had good opportunities," Xander Bogaerts said. "Good people at the plate at that moment, too. ‘Tati' was coming up, and the other one was Miggy. I mean, what more could you ask for? … But it was one of those days where it was meant to go to the shortstop for a double play, which is pretty crazy."

Well …

The second of those inning-ending double plays was unexpected, maybe.

It was hit by Miguel Andujar, the Padres' most consistent hitter this season.

The first was hit by Fernando Tatis Jr., the player the Padres expected to be their best hitter this season.

And his is the troubling one.

Andujar had an eight-game hitting streak come to an end last night. He drove in three of the Padres' five runs in the series against the Dodgers. Among Padres players with at least 80 plate appearances, he is tops in batting average (.290), third in on-base percentage (.315) and second in slugging percentage (.505).

Tatis' 94.6 mph groundball hit right at shortstop Mookie Betts exemplified the season he is having and the biggest albatross for a Padres' offense that ranks last in the major leagues with a .221 batting average and a .658 OPS.

The Padres have 10 players with at least 100 plate appearances. Six of them have a batting average of .215 or worse, and Tatis is not one of them. Six of those 10 players also have an OPS of .603 or worse, and that does include Tatis.

He is not the entire problem.

But he is batting at the top of the order. He is being paid to be one of their top producers.

And if he had to this point even matched his previous worst start to a season, he would rank second on the team in home runs and batting average and third in OPS. And we would not be so strongly considering the possibility the Padres' 29-20 record is a cruel tease.

Tatis is in something of an all-time slump, considering how good he has been in his career.

In his previous six big-league seasons, he never went more than 17 plate appearances into a season without a home run. He has 206 plate appearances this season and has yet to hit a home run and has really only come close twice.

There have been 66 players with a 42-homer season since 2000, including Tatis in 2021. The only one of those players to have gone as long as Tatis has without a homer at any point in a subsequent season was Luis Gonzalez, who did not homer over a span of 246 plate appearances in 2006 during his age-38 season. (Tatis last night surpassed a stretch of 204 homerless plate appearances by 39-year-old Miguel Cabrera in 2022.)

Unless we are to believe he had to get worse before getting better, it seems Tatis is going backward.

• His 53% groundball rate this season is 35th highest in the major leagues. He was at 48% on May 1, which was not that much higher than his career average. But 32 of his 51 (63%) balls in play since then have been grounders.
• Of his past 70 plate appearances, 41 have ended in a groundout or strikeout.
• His 55 balls in play at 100 mph or harder are tied for eighth most in the major leagues this season. But 30 of those have been grounders, which is second most.
• Of his past 16 hits, 13 have had an exit velocity of 89 mph or lower. Six of those have been grounders.
• He has hit three balls in the air with a projected distance of 370 feet or further. His longest fly ball was 393 feet.
• His 31% rate of chasing pitches outside the strike zone is in the 42nd percentile, just a bit below average. But he has chased at a 35% rate over the past 20 games, compared to a 27% rate over his first 28 games.

We started talking about Tatis' lack of power in early April. He has opened his stance. He has changed his leg kick. He has altered his swing path. He has gone back and forth. The timing between his upper and lower body and hands is askew. It has been any and all of those things.

And now, he is lost.

There was a time he was lining out at 111 mph and holding his head high afterward.

Now, even if you are not an amateur psychiatrist and aren't reading his body language, which has practically become a hobby for Padres fans in recent years, his swinging at so many uncompetitive pitches lately will tell you his head is not where it needs to be.

"It's natural for anyone to press when they’re trying to get out of a slump," manager Craig Stammen said. "… This game is a mentally tough game, and especially when you’re struggling. You want to get out of it so fast, and sometimes the opposite is true of how you need to get out of it. So it’s up to us coaches to talk to Fernando and be able to pat him on the back and try to teach patience to him and preach patience to him to help him get through this struggle - probably the biggest struggle that he’s had in his major league career at the plate."

You can read in my game story (here) about yesterday's 4-0 loss to the Dodgers, which included center fielder Jackson Merrill departing a few innings after wrenching his back leaping to try to catch Shohei Ohtani's leadoff homer.

After losing two of three in the first series of the season against their rivals, the Padres are 1½ games back in the National League West and holders of the top NL wild card spot, a half-game up on the Cubs.

There are 113 games to play.

The standings are unimportant.

But the sample size is no longer small.

The mere contention by Stammen that yesterday's game was "closer than what the score indicated" shows how significant Tatis is for the Padres.

Andujar's grounder that ended the eighth inning was a nail in the coffin.

Tatis' double-play grounder, on the first pitch he saw against a struggling Ohtani in the fifth inning, was the beginning of the end.

If he doesn't get markedly better - and it still seems preposterous to think he won’t - we will say essentially the same thing about his role in the Padres' season.

Tidbits

There are none. Not this morning.

Every once in a while, we have to do without tidbits.

So that's it for me.

No game today, so no Padres Daily tomorrow.

Jeff Sanders will have a story revisiting the Mason Miller trade and its effect on the Padres on our site later today.

The next newsletter will be in your inbox Saturday morning after the series opener against Miller's former team, the Athletics.

Talk to you then.

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This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 6:54 AM.