Former MLB catcher gives Padres fans the lazy Fernando Tatis Jr. discourse they’re tired of hearing

There are fair ways to talk about Fernando Tatis Jr.’s slow offensive start. This may not be one of them. When MLB catcher Erik Kratz went on Foul Territory and said Tatis’ power has been down “ever since he got caught doing steroids,” it wasn’t exactly hard to predict how Padres fans would respond.

They have heard this before. Tatis struggles, the suspension gets dragged back into the middle of the conversation, and suddenly every batted ball becomes a referendum on 2022 instead of a baseball discussion about what is actually happening in 2026.

If Tatis is not producing, that’s a real problem. But reducing the entire thing to steroids is lazy. It’s the kind of take that sounds loud enough to travel, but not careful enough to be useful.

And Padres fans were not having it. The replies came fast. Some were jokes. Some were shots at Erik Kratz’s own career. One of the more viral responses asked people to like the post if they had a higher career bWAR than him, which is the kind of petty baseball internet was basically built to manufacture. But beneath the jokes, Padres fans were making a much better point.

Erik Kratz turns Fernando Tatis Jr.’s slump into the same tired Padres debate

The power is not gone in the way that take suggests. Tatis entered this conversation with a genuinely frustrating offensive line. But if we are asking whether the raw ability to impact the baseball has disappeared, the answer is also pretty clearly no.

Tatis has a 92.7 mph average exit velocity, a 58.6 percent hard-hit rate, and an 11.7 percent barrel rate in 2026. His actual wOBA sits at .283, but his expected wOBA is much better at .353, which is basically the data screaming, “Hey, the production and the quality of contact are not telling the same story.”  

That matters because Kratz, while making the steroid-centered argument, also conceded the part that makes the whole thing more complicated. He said the exit velocity is still there. That in itself is the detail.

Because if the ball is still coming off Tatis’ bat with authority, then this is not as simple as saying the power vanished. It’s more about whether he is getting the ball in the air enough, whether his swing path is producing the right kind of contact, and whether the version of Tatis shaped by shoulder surgery, wrist surgery, missed time, and a move into right field is still searching for the exact offensive shape that made him terrifying in the first place.

That is where the Padres’ real concern lives. Not in pretending 2021 is coming back. And not in acting like the 42-homer, .975 OPS version of Tatis is just hiding around the corner. That version may be hard to replicate, regardless of how anyone wants to frame the past.

But there is a big gap between “Tatis may not be a 40-homer superstar anymore” and “Tatis has zero power because of steroids.”

Padres fans are right to push back, but Tatis still has to turn loud contact into damage

Padres fans are right to reject the laziest version of the Tatis conversation. But the Padres also need more than strong exit velocity readings and expected numbers.

That’s why the launch angle discussion is so much more interesting than the PED shortcut. If Tatis is still hitting the ball hard but not getting enough lift, the problem becomes fixable in a baseball sense. It becomes about timing, lower-half direction, contact point, and whether he can get back to driving the ball instead of pounding too many hard-hit balls into the wrong parts of the field.

That’s a much more useful conversation than grabbing the most inflammatory explanation and calling it analysis.

This is where the Padres fan reaction actually made sense beyond the usual defend-your-guy reflex. They were saying the take was incomplete. Because nobody watching this team closely thinks Tatis’ offensive start has been good enough. They don’t need someone to tell them Tatis hasn’t looked like peak Tatis. They can see that.

What they are tired of is the sport acting like every Tatis discussion has to begin and end with the suspension. At some point, if we are going to analyze the player in front of us, we have to actually analyze the player in front of us.

And the player in front of us is not that simple. He’s still an elite athlete, a premium defender, and he’s still hitting the ball extremely hard. He’s also not giving the Padres the power production they need from one of the most important hitters in the organization. 

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