Fernando Tatis Jr. Finally Hit A Damn Homer

Baseball is the only sport that regularly produces the following thought in my head: Does everyone who is good at baseball actually kind of suck at baseball? The existence of Shohei Ohtani makes it impossible to ever answer with a definitive yes, but the question lingers still. Related to this matter is the plight of Fernando Tatis Jr. Not so long ago, he was a young Padres shortstop showing signs of becoming the best player in the league. He produced 6.7 bWAR across 143 games in his first two seasons, and then broke out in year three with 42 homers, a .975 OPS, and 6.6 bWAR. But then, oops, he got suspended for taking PEDs and missed the entirety of the 2022 season. Since then, he's remained a highly productive if slightly less powerful player in the seasons. He hasn't hit more than 25 homers in a season since his suspension, but he played 155 games last year and finished with 6.1 bWAR. Twenty-five homers is significantly fewer than 42, but it is also not a small enough number to have signaled that Tatis would start the 2026 MLB season swinging a damn noodle bat. Coming into Saturday's game against the Nationals, Tatis had gone 55 games without hitting a homer, and was in the midst of the longest homer-less streak (238 plate appearances) of any player in the league. That humiliating streak mercifully ended yesterday when he clobbered a pitch 451 feet into the left-field seats.