What The Game Calls For

Off The Garden Path

Fernando Tatis Jr. made a triumphant return to play on Monday, a 3-0 win at home over the Tigers. Tatis’ return to the field was fascinating for a number of reasons. First, Annie Heilbrunn’s pregame question for Tatis had a surprising answer:

Courtesy: 97.3 The Fan

Tatis is not fully healed from his injury despite his return. When the Padres announced Tatis was going on the IL with a stress reaction June 21st, we felt there was a small chance he would return during the season. We assumed the team would not permit a return before he was fully healed. Turns out we were wrong about that. This surely isn’t a decision the team made lightly. And they didn’t make it out of desperation. The team has played exceptionally well without Tatis, going 39-21 in his absence. They didn’t need him to return to save the season. And he is very clearly a part of the team’s long term plans with 10 years and $300 million left on his contract; they would not rush him back if they felt his long term health were at risk. The exact calculus can’t be known by those outside the organization. Returning before the stress reaction is fully healed does mean the specter of injury is going to be in the back of all our minds down the stretch. But the experts who know best, the Padres staff, and most importantly Tatis himself, have deemed he’s ready to return. So we are going to keep concerns about the injury in the very back of our minds, the deep recesses, and simply enjoy the return of an all-world right fielder.

The Eye Test

Something that was easy to notice in the game on Monday is that Tatis looks healthy. You can see right away the bat speed is there:

He didn’t square the ball up, but that was the fastest swing any player took all game at 86.8 MPH. Upper echelon stuff.

Another sign the Tatis is truly ready to go is that he played right field instead of DHing. He made immediate contributions in the field, though it may not show up in the box score:

The closing speed he showed getting to that ground ball was elite, and his gait was smooth, not at all antalgic. The Tigers clearly have the scouting report on Tatis’ arm strength and propensity for throwing behind runners. The speedy Riley Greene barely takes a turn around second. Opposing baserunners are going to take extra bases less often now that Tatis is back in the field.

Team Chemistry

The most interesting part of Tatis’ return game was his final at bat, and the postgame analysis from Mike Shildt. The Padres took a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the eighth looking to create some breathing room for Robert Suarez. Kyle Higashioka led off with a double and Mason McCoy laid down a bunt that went for a single. Luis Arraez followed with another single to score Higashioka to bring up Tatis with runners on first and second. On the first pitch of the at bat Tatis took this swing:

At first the play seems unremarkable, a routine ground ball. But when you look closer there’s more to it. First, it’s pretty hard to hit a ball that far inside to the opposite field. The pitch was a sinker which tails in towards the right handed hitter, a normal bat path is likely to strike the outer part of the ball sending it to the pull side. Tatis hits the ball on the inner half sending it to the right side of the infield. It was also the slowest swing to put a ball in play all game at 56 MPH with an absurdly short swing length of 5.7 feet. It really looks like there was intent behind that swing. And not without reason. It’s difficult to tell on the broadcast but just as Tatis is settling into the batter’s box before the at bat you get a good glimpse of the defensive alignment against him:

First baseman Spencer Torkelson is alone on the right side of the infield with the second baseman playing straight up the middle and not visible in the shot (blocked by the catcher/umpire). Tatis may have been trying to punch a ball through that wide open right side of the infield. In fact Mike Shildt would state after the game this is exactly what Tatis was intending:

This is really fascinating. He’s suggesting Tatis intentionally took a contact swing with an opposite field approach on a first pitch fastball. Make no mistake, playing baseball this way is not ‘run maximizing’. If you played the Tatis at bat 1000 times the Padres would likely score more total runs if he swung for the fences each time; the times he would strikeout or pop out would be made up for by the times he’d hit it out of the park or for extra-bases. But Shildt is implying the team is comfortable with this tradeoff: a swing that produces less chance for a big home run, but a higher probability of ensuring something productive happens in this one at bat, even if that thing produces fewer total runs over infinite iterations of the at bat. Your mileage may vary on that being the correct baseball strategy. But we should all be able to agree on one thing: Fernando Tatis Jr., returning from a hiatus that saw the team play to its best stretch of the season, and saw the rise of Jackson Merrill to stardom with national recognition, would have had every reason to want to swing for the fences. To chase a moment of personal glory. To remind everyone that Fernando Tatis Jr. is back. It would be completely understandable. And for some, irresistible. Hero ball. Instead he was only focused on one thing: doing what the game called for to help the team win. That’s a watershed moment for cultural buy-in. That’s team chemistry.

What The Game Calls For

Fernando Tatis Jr. took both the hardest swing of the game and the softest swing of the game and in doing so showed the Padres embrace of situational baseball. Early in the game when it isn’t known how many runs will be needed to win, it makes sense to sell out for power, take a three-true-outcomes (TTO) approach at the plate because this will maximize the total runs scored over a large sample size of innings. Swing 86.8 MPH and try to hit one to the moon. But when it’s very late in the game and a team has a good idea of how many runs it will need, and that number is only a run or two, it may be a better path to slow things down: trade some of that theoretical upside from big home runs for a better chance to punch a ball through the right side… to switch modes. Because you’re no longer playing a large sample size game.

We’ve written about this idea of ‘mode switching’ from a power approach to a contact approach. One thing we’ve repeatedly pointed out is that it’s been fairly well established that a power-centric TTO approach is a superior strategy for producing the most runs over the long-term. But in order to know if mode switching to a contact approach ‘when the game calls for it’ is a superior strategy for producing wins, you would need a piece of information that is not in the box score: intent. You would have to know when a player is intentionally mode switching because he sees an advantage on the field, like a solitary first baseman trying to cover an entire half of an infield, and you’d have to see how this strategy played out over the long haul. This study has never been done, and indeed cannot be done with the box score data that have been the key inputs to the spreadsheets that have informed the current baseball decision making cannon. It cannot be proven that the Padres embrace of situational baseball is a superior strategy, and if a thing can’t be proven it may not be true. This does not seem to bother the 2024 Padres. And that’s interesting.

The 2024 Padres are an outlier, taking atypical tactics in a largely homogenized game. And it seems that they have buy-in. Right down to their superstar right fielder. Whether or not you’re a Padres fan it should be clear that this is a unique team. A team worthy of study. A team that’s deviated from the garden path.