Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. finally remembers he is allowed to hit home runs

Oh, we are so back. Probably? Maybe. At the very least, Fernando Tatis Jr. finally hit a baseball the way he’s supposed to hit a baseball, and that’s enough for Padres fans to act a little ridiculous for a few hours. Nobody needs to apologize for it either. This fan base has spent nearly two full months watching one of the loudest players in the sport treat the home run column like a restricted area. 

At some point, the standards get weird. A superstar hitting his first homer of the season in late May shouldn’t feel like a holiday, but here we are. Pop the cheap champagne.

Tatis’ 451-foot blast at Nationals Park left the bat at 114 mph, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s been hitting the ball hard all season. But this one wasn’t a wall-scraper. He earned it. 

The Padres have survived a lot already this season. A wobbly rotation and a lot of different lineup configurations. But the Tatis drought had become its own special kind of bizarre. Every few games, we were forced into the same conversation. He was hitting the ball hard. He was still contributing. And the underlying metrics said not to panic. But at the same time, just hit the ball over the fence, my guy.

Fernando Tatis Jr.’s first home run could be the Padres’ June turning point

There’s only so long a fan base can be expected to celebrate exit velocity screenshots while the home run total sits there looking unemployed. Tatis can impact a game in a multitude of ways. But he’s also paid, celebrated and marketed like a franchise-altering superstar because he can do the thing that makes an entire ballpark gasp before the camera finds the baseball.

The best part about this homer is the timing. Tatis waited until June was basically knocking on the door, wondering if anyone was home. Maybe we can treat the first 56 games as a very expensive beta test. Or a long, confusing trailer for the actual season.

And now the real version might be ready to arrive. Of course, the Padres need this to be more than one swing. One homer does not erase two months of frustration. But it does change the feeling.

Before this swing, every Tatis at-bat carried a little more tension than it should have. Padres fans were not analyzing anymore. They were bargaining until he finally got a hold of one.

Celebrate it. Laugh about it. The jokes are already incoming. Say his season started now. Or that he finally remembered the rules allow him to hit the ball over the fence.

Whatever it may be, the Padres have been waiting for this version of Tatis to show up.

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