San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
THE NEXT KING? TATIS HAS LONG WAY TO GO TO MATCH LBJ, BUT TALENT THERE
When the Padres guaranteed $340 million last month to Fernando Tatis Jr., in return for getting 10 additional years of contractual control beyond the four they already had, they compared their 22-year-old shortstop to a basketball king.
“He’s the Lebron James of shortstops,” a Padres official said in a text message to a reporter for The Athletic. “Can’t find guys like this.”
It was a bold comparison but not an outrageous one, despite the profound differences between baseball and basketball.
James and Tatis both achieved quick stardom in their respective sports leagues. Courted by corporate America to endorse products, each heady athlete mined gold. Still. Lebron James? The Padres couldn’t be accused of thinking small when they linked Tatis, who has all of 143 big-league games behind him, to an athlete known on a few continents simply by his first name.
James, 36, has led three different franchises to his
sport’s title since he entered the NBA at age 18. He appeared in eight consecutive NBA Finals as his team’s best player. Today, he’ll join his 17th All-star team. He’s known as The King.
Tatis, who was 20 when he played in his first MLB game, has yet to play a fulllength, big-league season. At 22, he’s known as El Niño. Little Boy.
Five years ago James overcame one of deepest sports slumps of modern times when he ended Cleveland’s title drought in the “Big Three” of football, baseball and basketball by taking the Cavaliers to the 2016 NBA crown. The title was Cleveland’s first since the Browns won the 1964 NFL title behind Jim Brown, the Hall of Fame running back.
As he wears James’ same jersey No. 23, can Tatis pull off a similar feat for San Diego by bringing the city its first World Series trophy? “We’re aiming for the big cake,” he said last summer, before the Padres would win their first playoff series since 1998.
Tatis is just starting his MLB career. But as James did when he went directly from his Akron high school to the NBA, he has earned high scouting grades across a wide spectrum of his sport’s traits. His breadth of talent improves his odds of aging well.
Offensively, it’s reasonable to expect he’ll maintain good returns into his 30s. His explosive right-handed swings afford rare plate coverage. His footspeed can bust hitting slumps. Health seems the lone large caveat.
“His all-fields power should help him as he gets older,” said Merv Rettenmund, who went to seven World Series in a five-decade career as an outfielder and hitting coach. “His hitting, he’ll get smarter. He’s only 22. He’ll get even stronger. His skill should definitely be there at 35.
“I’ve seen him hit high pitches as well as anybody,” Rettenmund said, “and I’m sure he’s a low-ball hitter. I’ve seen him toast the ball all over. He hits the ball all over the place.”
Rettenmund said the broad-shouldered, bighanded Tatis has extraordinary strength, even at 22. Good genes may be on his side. In the early 1990s when baseball scouts evaluated teenage amateurs in the Dominican Republic, they awarded high grades to Tatis’ father for traits headed by the strength he showed as a right-handed, teenage slugger from San Pedro de Macoris. The elder Tatis would spend 11 years in the big leagues, mostly at third base. For all of the impressive talent in the Dominican Republic back then, scouts wondered if dietary challenges among the country’s youths were limiting the strength of the teenagers they scouted. The elder Tatis possessed rare strength, even at 18.
Not just strong, Tatis Jr. is much faster than his father was.
Defensively and on the basepaths, his entertaining blend of speed, agility and daring make you wish the baseball was in play far more often.
Both share great athleticism
James didn’t have that problem as a basketball player. The sport demanded he make frequent use of his astounding speed, agility and explosiveness. When he famously chased down Andre Iguodala and swatted his layup in Game 7 of the 2016 Finals at Oakland — a play known as The Block — it was also his 16th block of the series and ninth of the final three games, all of them Cavs victories.
The 260-pound James, 45 minutes into the game, ran more than 20 mph and soared to 11 feet, 5 inches to redirect the basketball.
In fewer than 162 career games, Tatis has assembled a highlight montage as exciting as thunderous NBA dunks and shots swatted into the stands. Like Keanu Reeves’ character Neo dodging bullets in “The Matrix,” he has evaded fielders’ tag attempts.
His zest for the chasedown is Lebron-like. Advantaged not only by his speed and tracking skill but his rifle arm, which allows him to play deeper, he serves the Padres as a de facto fourth outfielder.
He did a fair imitation of The Block last summer when he stunned Astros slugger George Springer with a bounding, over-theshoulder backhanded snag of a blooper into nearly medium left field.
Earning him infield singles and extra bases, the speedster maintained an average sprint speed of 29.4 feet per second to place second in MLB, per Statcast, among players who logged at least 200 plate appearances last year. In the same average of a player’s fastest one-second window on the basepaths, Tatis was 2.4 feet faster than the average shortstop’s clocking.
So at 22, Tatis has a cushion in power, speed and arm strength. He can lose some speed and still be fast in his late 20s, the typical peak years for an MLB player.
Durability remains question
The Lebron comparison goes completely out the window, however, when projecting Tatis Jr.’s health and durability, to say nothing of the health and durability of any other young athlete.
James’ durability has exceeded even his Hall of Fame-caliber skills, while also increasing his knowhow. He stands first among active players in games played (1,301) and first all time in postseason games played (260). It wasn’t until his 16th NBA season that James, at 34, suffered a severe injury — the torn groin muscle that ended his first season with the Lakers.
Tatis, in comparison, was sidelined for at least a few weeks by three injuries across a 13-month span beginning two years ago.
First was a fractured left thumb, off a stolen-base try, that ended his Double-a season in July 2018.
A left hamstring strain incurred in a stretch for a throw would cost him 34 games with the 2019 Padres. “It went a little longer than we thought it was going to be,” Tatis said after returning in June.
In August of that season, a swing from the batter’s box caused Tatis to wince. After a visit from the team trainer and manager Andy Green, he finished the atbat with a swinging third strike. As it turned out, his season was over.
The Padres reported a “stress reaction” in his lower back and shut Tatis down for the season. A stress reaction is the breaking down or weakening of bone structure and can be a precursor to a stress fracture.
Former MLB strength and conditioning coach Jim Malone wasn’t familiar with details of Tatis’ injury, but spoke recently about the general outcomes associated with such setbacks.
“When he hurt his back, that stress reaction type of thing is not uncommon in young athletes because of the torque and the bones are not quite fully mature,” said Malone, whose sevenyear tenure with the Padres included the team’s mostrecent full-season run to the NL West title in 2006. He added: “I don’t think the low-back thing is necessarily demonstrative of, is this going to be a long-term problem.”
Tatis is still “filling out” as his body matures, said Hall of Fame shortstop Alan Trammell and Malone.
A body’s thickening will present maintenance challenges. Both Trammell and Malone, speaking generally, said the challenges are manageable but require diligence.
Tall for his age, Tatis was 16 when the White Sox signed him in July 2016. Eight months later, he had grown to 6-foot-3 and 175 pounds, reported Baseball America.
The Padres said he was 6-foot-4 and 203 pounds at the start of spring training last month. That’s tall for a shortstop, and may portend Tatis adding several pounds to his frame, though his camp-opening weight this year was down 14 pounds from his 2020 reporting weight.
Certainly Padres manager Jayce Tingler won’t be giving Tatis the same delicious weight-management directive that Tigers manager Sparky Anderson issued his young middle infielders, Trammell and Lou Whitaker, at a comparable age in their careers.
Anderson told them to drink a milkshake most days in spring training, sending them to the Steak ’n Shake near the duo’s digs in Lakeland, Fla.
“Oh, yeah,” recalled Trammell, now a Tigers special assistant to GM Al Avila. “We had a little sweet tooth. That’s right from Sparky Anderson. We needed to get some weight on us. We hadn’t developed yet.”
The 6-foot Trammell, who debuted with the Tigers at 19, just 15 months after the team drafted him out of San Diego’s Kearny High, weighed 165 as a rookie. Peaking at 185 pounds, he maintained consistent weight in his career. “That was important,” he said.
He said working out regularly served him well throughout a run of 20 major league seasons. Strenuous offseason sessions — running, lifting weights and playing catch — under Padres trainer Dick Dent built his foundation of fitness.
“Basically, it’s a yearround job,” said Trammell, who is working with Tigers players this month in Florida and still wears a uniform. “That shouldn’t be any issue. It should be something that you love.”
Trammell, who weathered four cartilage-repair procedures to his left knee in his playing career, said he’s heard that Tatis is “very well grounded.” He deemed that essential.
“It’s easy to let your guard down and maybe just rely on your talent,” he said. “My advice is be careful of that, have good people around you. Stay with your (maintenance) program.” Counseling young Tigers hitters, Trammell has told them to “be careful” about how much batting practice they take. It’s easy to overdo it, he said.
The “stress reaction” that ended Tatis’ 2019 season didn’t seem an issue in 2020. Tatis appeared in 59 of the team’s 60 games, batting .277 with 17 home runs and 50 runs scored. He appeared in all six of the postseason games.
Key is to maintain fitness
Going forward, it’ll be up to Tatis and his support staff to maintain a fitness routine that takes into account an array of variables including diet. Malone isn’t familiar with what the Padres’ fitness program is for Tatis. Without passing any judgment on what the team’s plans might be, he shared some general thoughts on maintaining a $340-million shortstop.
“Doing a lot of resistance training and (weight) lifting would not be super high on the list as I was parceling out the ratio of his day to day work — but that doesn’t make it unimportant,” said Malone, who was the Pittsburgh Pirates head strength coach for three years before moving into consulting and youth evaluations. “For him, it’s a continuation of getting physically stronger and strength maturity. For him, his assets are always going to be his speed and his explosiveness. What can we do to enhance that? What can we do make sure he’s recovering on a nightly, daily and annual basis as he continues to mature?”
His chess matches with pitchers are evolving, but Tatis has won the early rounds in batting .301 with 39 home runs and a .956 on-base-plus-slugging percentage. Going for 27 for 36 on the basepaths, he has succeeded on 75 percent of his stolen-base tries. Defensively he made a huge jump in efficiency last year.
He’s baseball-wise beyond his years, having grown up in a big-league environment and played winter ball in the highly competitive Dominican league.
For Tatis to stay healthy enough to maintain top-tier production for the next 14 years, it may take not just diligence and wisdom but also good luck.
Among the contract extension’s skeptics, count former Florida Marlins President David Samson. “Fernando Tatis took zero percent of the risk,” Samson said on his CBS podcast. “He gave zero discount and I mean zero.” The former MLB executive said he didn’t blame Padres executive A.J. Preller’s negotiation of the deal, but forecast that “Fernando Tatis will not be a Padre at the end of this contract.”
If the Padres win a World Series, not only will San Diego party like it’s 1999 — the year Tatis was born — but the contract extension will pencil out a lot more readily.
Trammell suggested Tatis will do his part to reduce the odds of injury and age-related performance decline, between now and 2035.
“Good ones will always figure it out,” he said. “That’s what they do. They’re always adjusting. That’s never gonna change. That’s one of the reasons that makes them good.”
tom.krasovic@sduniontribune.com