San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
TATIS DOES REMEMBER HOW TO HIT
All smiles on 2-for-3 day; Salas, 16, looks beyond age in debut
Fernando Tatis Jr. has been having fun with this, smiling and laughing plenty through his first six Cactus League games without a hit.
All through the 19 plate appearances, in which three walks were the only thing to even come close to reminding the masses that he was not so long ago considered by many to be the best player in the major leagues.
Finally, the hits came Saturday. The laughs continued.
Between giggles, after he departed the Padres’ 6-5 victory over the White Sox, Tatis said, “Feels great. Like I said, just needed a couple games. And I remember how to hit.”
Tatis even jokingly asked for the ball while standing at first base after his first-inning single.
For that hit, he hit a hard grounder that caromed off White Sox shortstop Erik Gonzalez’s glove and bounced into left field. After grounding out sharply to third base in the third inning, Tatis went the other way with the first pitch he saw in the fifth inning for a two-run double that bounced off the wall in rightcenter field.
They were his beststruck balls of the spring.
“It feels great,” he said as he again smiled wide. “Especially, you know, all these games people waiting and seeing expectations of people talking about if I remember how to hit. But at the end of the day, that’s part of this game, and I’m just happy to be back playing baseball.”
The 24-year-old Tatis missed all last season because of a wrist injury suffered in the offseason and a PED suspension handed down on Aug. 12. He had surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder in September and a second wrist surgery in October. He resumed baseball activity in January and didn’t start swinging a bat in earnest until late that month.
He had alternated between extremely selective and a bit too aggressive at the plate in spring games.
“It’s definitely clicking,” Tatis said Saturday. “I just needed to … see more pitches, get accustomed at the plate, get accustomed to the (pitch) clock, which was adding to all this madness. But I feel great so far.”
Tatis said that he went back to an old habit this week — a whole bunch of batting practice.
“I just went back to hitting a little bit more outside,” he said. “That’s what I do before I come to spring training. I kind of missed it this year because I wasn’t back home with my squad. I just go out there and hit for one hour, an hour and a half. … I said, ‘I want to get back to this.’ I (felt) like my shoulder and my wrist were in a good spot to build up my swings, and it’s clicking so far.”
Tatis will miss the first 20 games of the season while serving the remainder of his suspension. With the remaining games in spring training, possibly appearing in intrasquad and/or “B” games and a 15-day rehab assignment allowed before his season debut, Tatis should get upward of 75 plate appearances before joining the Padres on April 20.
Young kid, big deal
Ethan Salas is 16. He caught the final four innings of Saturday’s game for the Padres.
“Age is just a number,” Salas said afterward. “I’ve been preparing for this thing. My preparation is really good. … Just another normal game for me.”
The Padres have been bringing up teenagers to play in Cactus League games for several years since A.J. Preller and his baseball operations staff began stocking the minor league system and pushing players as fast as their ability would allow.
But none had been as young as Salas. And none had played catcher.
“I’ll tell you, he’s well beyond his years,” Padres manager Bob Melvin said. “You watch the way he frames pitches. A couple balls in the dirt got by him, but he has his wits about him. Pretty well developed for a 16-year-old.”
The Padres, who believe Salas can advance quickly through the minor leagues and perhaps be their primary catcher by 2025, had planned all along for Salas to play in a big-league spring game at some point this month. He was not told, however, until Saturday morning.
He said his response was, “Cool. Thanks.”
Melvin, a former major league catcher, was impressed by Salas’ ability to softly receive pitches, especially given the circumstances.
“It would have been really easy to go in there and get hard-handed, (especially) when you don’t block a ball and it gets by you and now you start slapping at some pitches,” Melvin said. “But he didn’t. He stayed under every one. It’s pretty incredible to see a 16-year-old with that kind of composure.”
Salas was considered the top available player internationally this winter, and he signed with the Padres for $5.6 million. It was the thirdhighest bonus the franchise had ever awarded an international free agent. Several people in the team’s personnel department have said he is the best catching prospect they have ever seen.
Salas walked twice in four plate appearances in a Venezuelan League game in November.
“This was a lot more exciting,” he said.
Then he went back to, “Just another baseball game.”
Lopes charging
If it weren’t for Tatis getting back to being Tatis and the kid who is hardly old enough to drive catching, Tim Lopes would have been the talk of Saturday’s game.
The 28-year-old infielder continued to push for a roster spot.
Lopes was 2-for-2 on Saturday and stole two bases. His .448 average (13-for-29) leads the major leagues this spring, and his six steals are second most behind the Rockies’ Zac Veen.
Lopes has started at second, shortstop and third in Cactus League games. He hit .246/.310/.352 over 290 major league plate appearances between 2019 and ’21, and last year he hit .271/.333/ .451 in Triple-a with the Rockies.
He signed a minor league deal with the Padres in December.
“The Padres were the first team to call me,” Lopes said this week. “That was appealing in itself. I felt wanted and felt like they liked me and wanted to bring me in.”
The Padres’ star-studded infield has a lot of players that can play multiple positions, which would seem to lessen the need for another bench player able to do that.
However, Lopes has been hitting the ball all over the field and can run. The latter skill is one the Padres bench is short on outside of outfielder Jose Azocar.
“He’s playing great,” Melvin said of Lopes. “Depending on what the need is, as far as infielders go, with he and (Rougned) Odor,
yeah, all these guys are in the conversation.”
Stammen update
There appeared to be good news regarding reliever Craig Stammen, who departed his outing Friday after feeling pain in his shoulder while throwing a pitch.
Said Melvin: “The training staff thinks it’s might not be as bad as it looked.”
Stammen missed two months last season with a shoulder injury. The 39year-old right-hander has been with the Padres since 2017. The organization’s longest-tenured major leaguer is in camp on a minor league contract.