Padres' Fernando Tatis Jr. Is Back and Primed to Take Over MLB ...

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Fernando Tatis Jr. is back. Of that there can be no doubt. As to whether he'll again be the Fernando Tatis Jr. who was once an ascendant Major League Baseball superstar, of that there can be lots of doubt.

There is, however, at least one good reason to be bullish.

It was for the first time since Oct. 3, 2021—and amid roughly equal smatterings of cheers and jeers—that Tatis suited up for the San Diego Padres on Thursday. The result was a 7-5 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field, wherein the former shortstop went 0-for-5 but contributed a brilliant running catch in performance of his new gig in right field.

"The feeling that I'm going to play baseball tonight," Tatis told reporters prior to Thursday's game, "it's just at the top of the world."

It will, of course, take more than one game for Tatis to prove that everything he went through over the last year and a half is stuck firmly in the past, and thus incapable of corrupting his present or his future.

As he came to town with one of the Diamondbacks' key National League West rivals, the boos that the 24-year-old Tatis heard Thursday were inevitable either way. They certainly would not have been as noticeable if not for the 80-game performance-enhancing drug suspension that MLB whacked Tatis with in August 2022.

Even before that, there were the motorcycle accidents that resulted in him having one surgery on his left wrist in March and then a second in October. In between, he also had surgery to repair the left shoulder that had been bothering him for a long time.

This, to be sure, is a lot to come back from. And the stakes? Well, they're high.

It's Not That There's No Pressure

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The Fernando Tatis Jr. of 2019 through 2021 was something, alright.

He may have spent his share of days (121, to be exact) sidelined with injuries, but when he played he was a living embodiment of the word "dynamic." He batted .293/.369/.596 with a 160 OPS+ and 13.6 rWAR in 273 games. He became the fastest player to reach 50 homers and 50 steals along the way and, prior to Thursday, was last seen in the majors leading the National League with 42 home runs in 2021.

Because he's fresh off sitting out an entired danged year, the hypothetical ideal-world scenario for Tatis would be one in which he eases back into being this guy again. But if this scenario exists in any dimension, it's not this one.

The Padres need Tatis to immediately start earning every penny of the $320 million that he's owed between now and 2034. Weeks after beginning 2023 with World Series aspirations that were largely rooted in their star-studded lineup, they rolled into Thursday's game in third place at 9-11 and with the NL's lowest batting average at .223.

Especially relevant where Tatis is concerned is that the club's right fielders had been hitting just .177. Upgrading that number will be his primary concern, though good defense seems like more of a must-have than a nice-to-have.

With Juan Soto in left, the Padres can ill afford to have two below average corner outfielders on either side of Trent Grisham. And while the speedy, strong-armed Tatis surely has the tools for right field, a questionable throw and a near-collision with Ha-Seong Kim on Thursday raised questions about his current grasp of the finer points of the position.

Either way, it's borderline impossible to imagine the Padres moving Tatis back to the infield. Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts are entrenched on the left side, while Kim's Gold Glove has unsurprisingly been an asset at second base.

It can only help that Tatis' teammates have his back again after understandably souring on him upon hearing the bad news last August. Padres fans will have his back as well. The rest of the baseball world, on the other hand, will not be as encouraging.

It's not as if his PED suspension slipped under the radar, after all. The most interest he's ever gotten on Google was in Aug. 2022, and searches for Triple-A pitcher Kade McClure even spiked after he ripped Tatis as a "cheater" in response to a long home run during the slugger's rehab assignment. At work here is not fame, but infamy.

It's Not That History Is Encouraging

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If Tatis can lean on anyone for support in the days, weeks and months to come, it's the guy on the Padres who's been through what he's facing right now: Nelson Cruz.

The 42-year-old is also a former PED suspendee by way of a 50-game ban in 2013 that came out of the Biogenesis scandal. Yet he returned in 2014 like nothing happened, launching 40 home runs and earning All-Star honors and MVP votes.

His advice to Tatis?

"He's got to go out there and do his job," Cruz told Alden Gonzalez of ESPN. "That's the only way he can shut up the noise."

Cruz isn't the only All-Star hitter who could vouch that it is possible to make a triumphant return from a PED suspension. Just among players who were also hit with 80-game suspensions, there's Dee-Strange Gordon, Starling Marte and Jorge Polanco. In their first full seasons back, they averaged 4.2 rWAR.

But then there are the guys whose returns from lengthy PED suspensions didn't go so well.

Think Manny Ramirez in 2009. Or Melky Cabrera in 2013. Or Ryan Braun in 2014. Or Robinson Cano in either 2018 or 2022. Or even Alex Rodriguez in 2015, as he really only had half a good year before beginning a descent that led to his release a year later.

Ultimately, the history of star hitters returning from PED suspensions is too much of a mixed bag to be of any encouragement. And that's without even getting into the obvious complication of Tatis being the only player (that we know of anyway) to be returning from a PED suspension and multiple wrist surgeries and a shoulder surgery all at the same time.

It's That He's Looked Like Fernando Tatis Jr.

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So why be bullish on Tatis? Take it from a guy who got to see him up close while he was on an eight-game rehab assignment with the Triple-A El Paso Chihuahuas.

"He needs to get up here ASAP. I've never seen anything like that," catcher Brett Sullivan told reporters. "You guys are in for something special when he comes back. He's ready."

Tatis' results in his eight games certainly support such a glowing review. He went 17-for-33 with two doubles and seven home runs, including three in one game on April 13.

The obvious counter here is that Tatis' results don't actually tell us much. Which is true, so it wouldn't be advisable to take them at face value if there was nothing to back them up.

It's a good thing, then, that Statcast data for minor league games is available in 2023. And our round-up of Tatis' batted balls makes one thing very clear: he truly did rake.

Graph via Google Sheets

Tatis' 30 batted balls averaged 94.0 mph off the bat, with a maximum speed of 115.4. He hit 18 of them at least 95 mph, amounting to a hard-hit rate of 60 percent. The average distance on all his batted balls was 200 feet.

How Tatis-like are these figures? Very Tatis-like. So much so that they're nearly carbon copies of the figures he put up between 2019 and 2021. Save for that average distance, which would trump his previous career high of 186 feet from '21.

Despite the year off and the trio of surgeries, this alone indicates that the premium bat speed that was such a vital part of Tatis' initial ascent is alive and well. And it continued to be evident even in his 0-fer on Thursday, wherein he hit one ball at 100.4 mph and another at 110.2 mph.

"I hit the ball hard," Tatis said after the game. "I hit the ball to every single part of the field. At the end of the day, this is baseball. I feel really good with my at-bats."

Regardless of how he plays in the field, Tatis can more than justify his bat staying in San Diego's everyday lineup if he keeps raking at this capacity. Heck, he might even live up to what would seem to be absurd projections, such as his 40-homer, 25-steal and 6.8-WAR output for Steamer.

There is, to be sure, probably no amount of hitting, running or fielding that Tatis can do in 2023 to win back everyone he lost when he was suspended.

But if he does his part to get those World Series aspirations back on track, one thing that's for sure is that the Padres and their fans will be wondering how they ever lived without him.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.