Sport can be difficult when health absent
The strongest impression of the infant Padres season is how difficult baseball had become for Fernando Tatis Jr., a year after it appeared easy for him at age 21.
Padres manager Jayce Tingler said the left shoulder injury sustained on a dive across home plate March 13 in the Cactus League may have affected Tatis worse than the player let on.
Tingler noted Tatis sat out several games after the injury. The hiatus cut into preparations, creating a doublewhammy later if Tatis in fact was still ailing more than he acknowledged.
The manager suggested Tatis may have been “pressing” to live up to the big contract the Padres issued him at the start of spring training.
It all made sense. One more piece to the puzzle: Baseball at the highest level is a high-wire act. Even for the best players.
Tatis’ five-game struggles called to mind an annual comment from Tony Gwynn that spoke to the sport’s capacity for cruelty.
For all his success at squaring up swerving, high-speed baseballs, Gwynn said he felt twinges of doubt every winter. Only a hail of line drives could chase them. He never could relax. Futility was lurking.
Gwynn described the daily routine as essential. During the season he hit baseballs off a tee nearly every day.
Without the constant sharpening, he said he would’ve lost control of the outside corner. He would’ve been exposed.
If a .338 hitter’s synapses require such vigilance, who is safe?
Tatis, whose recent struggles across five games ran the full spectrum, was searching for his hitting groove when his painful, flailing swing at an outside curveball Monday night dropped him to his knees for 42 seconds.
It had been a rough ride in many respects, notwithstanding the 465-foot home run he blasted Sunday.
There were jarring episodes, physically. Such as when he squared to bluff a bunt, only for a first-pitch fastball to buzz him. He went down hard.
At Petco Park, where the team had no exhibitions going into the season-opening stretch, it is different from the Cactus League to gauge a foul-line popup. A popup Tatis slightly misjudged caused him to retreat fast into the path of exuberant rookie Jorge Mateo; their collision jolted Tatis, who again landed hard.
In the second game he banged the left shoulder on a headfirst slide, as he was tagged out trying to steal third.
Trying to make a throw to second base, his foot slipped. The ball sailed for an error.
In vain he searched for the defensive flow that a year ago allowed him to lead all shortstops in efficiency.
He had six defensive miscues, five for errors, in the five games.
“He’s trying too hard,” former manager Buck Showalter said of an illadvised try to complete a double play that resulted in a throwing error.
He yanked one throw and spiked a few others.
His ground-ball groove hadn’t arrived, either. Not getting the best hop led to a pair of fielding errors.
Ahead, Tatis can use his time on the injury list to rebuild his underlying game. There’s plenty of schedule left for him to regain peak form.
The question is whether his left shoulder will allow it. Former Chargers team physician Dr. David Chao has said Tatis, at some point, will need surgery to repair the labral-cartilage tear in his left shoulder.
It may be best for him to stop sliding headfirst. Breaking that habit, however, could be tricky.
Preller was prepared
Setting aside the question of whether the Padres should’ve pledged $340 million to Tatis in light of recurring shoulder issues dating to age 17, it’s promising the team attacked the shortstop position behind him.
Ha-seong Kim, his replacement, was primarily a shortstop in the Korean league. At $28 million across four years, the contract General Manager A.J. Preller issued Kim last offseason suggests he’ll be better than a “replacement level” stand-in.
Shortstop CJ Abrams was the franchise’s top draftee in 2019, and despite him playing just 29 minor league games before this year (not counting intrasquad scrimmages last year during the pandemic), two scouts with other teams rated him the Padres’ top prospect coming out of spring training last month.
Not having shortstop Gabriel Arias available on the Triple-A roster is excusable. Rated by some scouts as the best prospect Preller dealt last summer, Arias went to Cleveland in the Mike Clevinger trade. In December a teenage shortstop prospect went to the Cubs as part of the package for Yu Darvish.
A strong season this year from Tatis has some Padres precedent. Trevor Hoffman overcame a labral tear to give the 1995 Padres a good season before having surgery.
If Tatis must be replaced for most of this year, there’s precedent for the Padres to still reach the playoffs.
The 2018 Dodgers overcame a season-ending elbow injury that April to a young, standout shortstop, Corey Seager, to win the West title on the 163rd game. Their primary shortstop? Chris Taylor, a $575,000-salaried utility man, though down the stretch it was Manny Machado, obtained that July in a trade that sent five prospects to the Orioles.
Kim resembling Chris Gomez would give the Padres a reliable defender and a serviceable bat, in similar “win now” circumstances. Gomez joined the ’96 Padres in June via a Kevin Towersengineered trade that sent struggling young shortstop Andujar Cedeno to Detroit (catchers John Flaherty and Brad Ausmus were also swapped). The Padres edged the Dodgers for the West title and two years later, with Gomez giving them a solid season on the dollar, they ran away from the West field.
Kim won’t be asked to hit in the middle of the lineup despite hitting 30 home runs last year, and Machado’s presence at third base should benefit him at shortstop.