Fernando Tatis Jr. slid feet-first into second base and, as the throw from catcher Webster Rivas bounced into center field, popped up and ran to third.
Reclining in a seat several rows up from the visiting dugout at Estadio Francisco A. Micheli, Padres manager Mike Shildt waited a few seconds before making a rhetorical observation:
“Fun to watch, isn’t he?”
It is perhaps particularly so here and now.
Tatis is the biggest name in the Dominican Winter League (LIDOM) this year. Starling Marte is set to join Escogido soon. The next-biggest names on Tatis’ Estrellas Orientales team are Robinson Cano, Miguel Sano and Jurickson Profar. Ronald Acuña Jr. played in his native Venezuela this month.
“Because (of) the money,” Fernando Tatis Sr., manager of Estrellas Orientales and the Padres star’s father, opined one afternoon this week. “Money makes you lose the love for this game. If you make the kind of money he is making right now and you are playing in the Dominican, it’s because you love the game. He loves the game.”
The elder Tatis paused before continuing.
“It’s good for him,” he said, “because as a baseball player, you need to be on the field.”
That is the overriding theme of conversations this week with father and son centered around why Tatis is playing in the Dominican for the first time since becoming a major leaguer.
“It brings you back to your roots,” the younger Tatis said Monday before playing in his fifth game for his hometown team. “I feel like myself. Here is where I became a really good baseball player, like where I separated from just having good talent to putting it in play and having results. … Baseball players, if they want to get better, they just need to play baseball.”
This is where he first recalls seeing his father, an 11-year MLB veteran, play. It is where he works under the watch of his father, who remains his most trusted coach. It is where he feels he truly launched his professional career and where he is launching what he believes will be a return to truly being the player he can be.
That Tatis is playing baseball on winter nights, under lights that are not quite bright, in front of crowds that are not yet big, alongside players that are a mix of well before their prime or well past their prime, means his journey back has hit its stride.
“This is the platform to make him ready to play in the big leagues,” the elder Tatis said before a game in San Pedro de Macorís, where he and Junior both grew up and where Senior now manages Estrellas.
Fernando Tatis Jr. lamented being unable to be on the field or even swing a bat or work out while home last winter, as he ramped up for his comeback season after missing all of 2022 due to injury and suspension.
“It was different,” he said this week. “It was hard. I couldn’t work out at full capacity before I got to (spring training). This year, it was just my talent that took over and helped me survive the season.”
So what is next season?
After flashing the big Tatis smile, he said: “It’s talent plus work.”
Tatis got back to work in earnest after a month-and-a-half of catching up on sleep, swimming in water that is practically a fluorescent shade of blue and hiking in mountains thick with palms, plantains and Caoba trees. Tatis began playing later than he initially wanted to, after his father said he was ready — and after the Padres had approved his playing 20 games or so.
Various injuries were the primary reason Tatis had not played here since the 2018-19 LIDOM season, when he sparked Estrellas to their first Dominican championship in 51 years.
That was the winter before he made his big-league debut and in relatively short order became the face of baseball.
This is the winter, he asserts, when he gets back to being the player that got him on the video game cover and in international ad campaigns for major brands.
“I’m going to be way better,” Tatis said. “Way better. I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but I’m just gonna tell you for sure I’m getting ready for a long season and I’m putting the work in.”
The Padres need the Tatis who was as powerful and explosive and exciting and dangerous as any player in the major leagues from 2019 through 2021 — when he wasn’t getting hurt and before he got suspended for a failed PED test.
As the organization’s baseball decision makers sat around A.J. Preller’s suite at the Opryland Hotel during the winter meetings earlier this month, pondering the unpleasant task of trading Juan Soto, they mulled the possibilities. They could keep Soto (and his projected $33 million salary) but would have to trade Jake Cronenworth and maybe Ha-Seong Kim and Robert Suarez, among others. But those internal debates inevitably returned to the firm belief that a lineup anchored by Tatis, Xander Bogaerts and Manny Machado was a fine foundation from which to start.
For that to be so, Tatis has to be Tatis.
Last year, in essence, was something like practice. And survival. Because he was not the player the Padres need him to be going forward.
“It was a good baseball year overall,” Tatis said. “But I can’t lie to everybody. I cannot say I played winning baseball or good baseball. But what everybody knows I am capable of is just a whole different story.”
Tatis batted .257/.322/.449 in 2023. That was perhaps about all that could have rightfully been expected.
He had surgery in March 2022 fto repair a wrist fracture suffered in an offseason fall of a motorcycle here. His rehab from that surgery was ramping up in mid-August 2022 when, after playing four games for Double-A San Antonio, he was suspended 80 games.
In the wake of that shutdown, Tatis agreed to undergo surgery to repair a labrum tear in his right shoulder. And while recovering from that procedure, he underwent a second wrist surgery. Tatis didn’t start working out until last January. After participating in spring training, while learning a new position, he got 39 plate appearances in Triple-A and made his season debut in the season’s 21st game.
Tatis’ 25 home runs ranked third on the Padres, and his 33 doubles led the team. His .771 OPS, however, was 204 points lower than in 2021 and 194 points off his career mark coming into the season. His 5.5 WAR, according to Baseball-Reference.com, was tied with Soto for eighth in the National League. However, Tatis’ oWAR was a mere 2.8 — 4.5 below his 2021 mark. A chase rate of nearly 36 percent was the highest of his career.
After the season, Fernando Tatis Sr. recalled saying to his son: “It’s not a good year. It’s not a great year. It’s not a bad year. It’s OK. But the talent that you have and the things that you can do on the field, those numbers are not enough.”
Tatis appeared in 141 of the Padres’ 142 games after his suspension was up. But he batted .213/.289/.383 over his final 104 plate appearances and acknowledged in the season’s final week that he was exhausted. Tatis looked forward to resting — and then getting back to playing.
“It has always been for me about swinging the bat more,” he said in September. “That’s what I always do (and) wasn’t able to do (before the season).”
This week, he said of the winter league: “It keeps you in baseball shape. It helps you stay on the fastball and helps you to work on whatever you didn’t have time during the season because you were already in the season. Now you put in the work.”
He is here with his favorite teacher.
“He’s been working to separate,” Fernando Tatis Sr. said. “He’s doing a little thing on the plate to get his hands in the perfect position to hit, slow his body down. Quick hands, slow his feet down a little bit more and stay focused to hit the ball in only one place, not in different places. We’re working on that. And it’s been going well.”
Monday, in his fifth game for Estrellas, Tatis ripped a three-run homer that tied the game in the top of the third inning. Estrellas beat Toros del Este that night, and beat Aguilas Cibaenas the next night to clinch a spot in the 18-game round robin tournament that begins Wednesday and goes to mid-January. The top two teams in that tournament will then play a best-of-nine championship series.
Tatis said he plans to play for Estrellas “as far as we go.” The Padres likely would not be on board with Tatis playing in the Caribbean Series should Estrellas advance to the tournament that runs through Feb. 9, about a week before the Padres’ first official full-squad workout.
Through Thursday, with one game remaining in the regular season, Tatis has walked seven times and is batting .304 (7-for-23) with a home run, a triple, a double and three stolen bases in seven games. He also walked seven times in his first five games.
“Just working on details that I feel like during the season was missing on the hitting part,” he said. “During the season, you’re a little afraid to try stuff. You’re already in the season and you just need results at the time. But now we can come and concentrate on what we thought we could have done better and just be a little bit more disciplined with it.”
Shildt was in the Dominican Republic primarily to see Tatis, watching two games and having dinner at Tatis’ home.
“Everything he went through — under the public microscope — to do as well as he did,” said Shildt, who also visited with new pitchers Jhony Brito and Randy Vásquez while here.
“We have a tendency to live in the past, harp on the past, and we don’t stop and look up and go, ‘Wait a minute, this guy played every day after missing 17 months, (having) three surgeries and performed at a high level … and actually leaned into some of the criticisms and the crowd and some of the things that are really, really hard to face.’ He faced them like an absolute man and a pro. He handled it at a high level, regardless of age. He hasn’t gotten enough credit for it. I’m excited about this year, and I know he is too. It’s gonna be a fun year for him.”
On Monday, Tatis played center field for the first time since joining Estrellas. But a position switch for the National League’s Platinum Glove winner in his first season in right field does not seem to be a real possibility for 2024.
“I’m a right fielder,” he said. “We have talked about it. A.J. gave me permission to play a little bit (of) center, a little bit (of) right. Let’s see how I’m focused later. But right now I’m a right fielder. And I’ve talked to A.J. also about the dimensions of our field, and I feel for me it’s a little bit more important to have a right fielder than a center fielder for Petco Park.”
He is not playing shortstop here, which his father and Estrellas management had proffered as a possibility last month. Tatis speaks only of the outfield for now, though he has in the past said a return to the infield someday is possible.
The elder Fernando Tatis was impressed by his son’s move to the outfield.
“I like it,” he said. “He’s doing great in the outfield. That takes me by surprise. The way he plays in the outfield, that’s unbelievable.”
Still, Tatis’ father leaves no question as to how he feels.
“When you have a shortstop that can cover that kind of ground and up … Junior is an exciting player,” Fernando Tatis Sr. said. “There are two players that keep me awake at nighttime to watch games — Junior and (Reds shortstop) Elly de la Cruz. Elly De La Cruz is gonna be a player that always does something in the game. That is not normal.”
There is time, even if the time is now.
Junior turns 25 on Jan. 2.
“He is still learning,” Fernando Tatis Sr. said. “He is still learning how to hit, how to make situations on the field. He is still learning how to make damage. He is still learning how to go the other way, how to stay inside the ball. Still learning how to play shortstop. He’s still learning. He’s only going to be 25. Can you imagine where he’s gonna be when he’s 28,29,30? If God gives him health, we’re going to have a lot of fun watching him play every day.
“And I told him, your goal this year is you need to have at least 500 at-bats. I don’t care how we’re going to do it, but you have to stay healthy. You have to play smart. You’ve got to be able to help your teammates every single game. No matter what happens, you’ve got to be there for your teammates. You’ve got to work for them. You’ve got to support them. You are the head. You’ve got to push.”
That push has started here.
“I don’t say I have anything to prove,” Tatis said. “But everybody just knows now what I’m capable of. It’s just a matter of I can get back to that level and perform as, you know, everybody is expecting and I am expecting of myself also. …
“The game reminds me every single day. It gives me small glimmers of who I am and what I’m capable of. And it’s just asking me for that little extra work.”
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