One swing change restored Fernando Tatis Jr. as the Padres’ biggest weapon

Fernando Tatis Jr. went 55 games without a home run. That sounds like a glitch. Yet, he found himself 207 at-bats into the 2026 season, still staring at a zero in the home run column. His first finally arrived on May 30, which ended the second-longest season-opening homer drought ever by a former 40-home-run hitter.

There were fewer folks saying the power hadn’t disappeared than there were saying he had fallen off. But there was evidence that Tatis was still hitting the ball hard. According to Steven Souza Jr., he was simply trying to yank everything.

Fastballs, breaking balls, pitches on the outer half, it didn’t matter. Tatis approached them as if every ball needed to be deposited somewhere near the Western Metal Supply Co. building. That pull-heavy mindset dragged his barrel away from the baseball and turned dangerous contact into harmless contact.

The simple swing change that unlocked Tatis’ home run power

The pitchers didn’t have to beat him because he was beating himself

“He was trying to pull everything and didn’t have the ability to stay inside [the ball] and drive it,” said the Padres hitting coach Steven Souza Jr. according to Times of San Diego.

That diagnosis explains much of the drought. It also runs directly against the eye-test theory circulating in media coverage. Many observers believed Tatis had abandoned his natural pull-side power while trying to use the whole field. Souza, the coach working directly with him, said the opposite: Tatis was trying to pull everything, preventing him from staying inside the ball and driving it.

The fix sounds almost laughably simple. We have seen those results. After finally breaking through, Tatis launched a 474-foot homer in Atlanta, the longest home run in the majors at the time. He followed that with a 465-foot missile in Arizona at 114.7 mph. His 11th homer was a 421-foot, three-run shot against Houston that left his bat at 110.6 mph. It’s not like he went out and started to hit wall-scrapers. None of those blasts were cheap.

Souza also said Tatis possesses enough natural hitting ability to chase a .350 average if that were his priority. Eh, that sounds a little extravagant. But there’s some truth to his skillset. The challenge is convincing one of baseball’s more explosive players that he doesn’t need to manufacture that much power.

Tatis got himself into trouble when he began swinging for the home run. Expectations will do that. He’s paid like a superstar, promoted like a superstar and expected to produce the kind of numbers that come with that.

After he finally stopped the issue, the home runs returned almost immediately.

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