Analysis: Don’t Fret About Fernando
Throughout the first half of the 2020 MLB season, there was no bigger story in baseball than Fernando Tatis Jr. - and for good reason.
To say that he had a good month of August is quite the understatement. Through the end of the month - or his first 37 games - he boasted a slash line of .313/.395/.660 with a 176 wRC+, all while leading the league in home runs, ranking 11th in FanGraphs defensive runs saved, and being a top-five base stealer. This thorough dominance of all parts of the game was reflected in his 2.7 fWAR, which was 0.8 wins above the next closest player and good enough for a 12-win pace over a full season.
As such, Tatis has been the center of attention for most of the 2020 season. Whether it was due to his ridiculous defensive highlights, his monster home runs, or his blatant disregard for the “unwritten rules” of the game, Tatis always found a way to make it onto SportsCenter every night. He was a young, exciting player who was completely dominating both his sport and the national spotlight. In many ways, it seemed like we were watching a full-blown superstar blossom before our very eyes. And at the beginning of September, it felt like Tatis was well on his way to collecting the first of hopefully many MVP trophies.
However, while this still might eventually be the case for Tatis, September has certainly slowed down his meteoric rise. Since September 1st, Tatis has slashed .170/.286/.321 and added just 2 home runs to his season total. And while he has still been great with the glove (1.1 DRS), just about every other part of Tatis’s game has inexplicably declined. Not only is he not hitting for power or average (as the slash line indicates), but he is also losing runs on the basepaths (-0.2 BsR after September 1st compared to 2.2 BsR before). The result? A 69 wRC+ (not nice) and 0.1 fWAR in September - 122nd in the league during this period.
Upon seeing this, most baseball fans (and particularly Padres fans) might be running for the panic button. If I’m being honest, this piece was originally going to be me doing just that. But the more I looked into his numbers, the more I think these worries are overblown.
Yes, his slash line is objectively bad, and the fact that he isn’t hitting any homers right now might be troubling. But here’s the thing - his underlying vitals are still great. His walk and strikeout rates are actually better than they were during August, and more importantly, his average exit velocity has held steady at an elite 95.4 MPH. In other words, he’s still taking the same approach to his at-bats, and when he makes contact, he hits the ball extremely hard. Even during this slump, only 2.5% of his batted balls were registered as “soft contact” (2nd lowest in baseball during this period) while he made “hard contact” on 45% of them.
That being said, there are two small things that may be causing some issues for his offense. For one thing, he is pulling the ball slightly less than he was previously. Before September 1st, he would pull the ball 46.7% of the time and go up the middle 32.4% of the time. After the 1st, those two numbers have basically swapped (30.0% and 47.5%, respectively). For a typical hitter, this kind of shift could hurt their power numbers because 1) it’s much more difficult to hit a home run to dead center and 2) most hitters are stronger at hitting the ball to their pull side. However, Tatis is not a typical hitter. As shown in the spray chart of his home runs below, his bat has great pop to all fields, meaning that while this has been hitting more balls up the middle, we cannot make a solid claim that this alone has led to his diminished power.
However, what has contributed to his decreased home run totals is his increased ground ball rate. In September, Tatís has hit 57.5% of his batted balls on the ground, compared to a 45.7% rate beforehand. This is quite a noticeable jump, and there’s no immediate explanation as to why, but a large part of it may be that he is chasing more pitches below the strike zone. While pitchers have actually thrown fewer pitches to lower part of the zone than they did last year, a much larger percentage of his ground balls this year are coming off of low pitches outside of the strike zone, as is shown by the visualizations below:
All pitches faced by Tatis in 2019, broken down by zone
All pitches faced by Tatis in 2020, broken down by zone
Pitches hit into play by Tatis with a launch angle <0, 2019
Pitches hit into play by Tatis with a launch angle <0, 2020
This, I believe, is simply the case of a young hitter needing to make an adjustment and work on his plate discipline. Furthermore, I don’t even think his ground ball rate has been that big of an issue during this slump. More than anything, Tatis has been getting extremely unlucky. As I previously mentioned, his strikeout rate, walk rate, and his exit velocity have all remained virtually the same, meaning that he is hitting the ball in play at the same rate and hitting it just as hard as before. The key difference? August Fernando had a BABIP of .359, and September Fernando has had a BABIP of .184. Through the 18th, Tatis had a batting average of just .143 in his last 50 plate appearances. Meanwhile, his expected batting average in those plate appearances was .242.
To put it in simple terms, Tatis is just not hitting ‘em where they ain't. He’s still hitting the ball really hard, but when you’re hitting more ground balls up the middle and fewer fly balls over everyone’s heads, it can be easy to fall victim to poor BABIP luck. Unfortunately, Tatis is learning this lesson the hard way.
But the good news here is that we shouldn’t necessarily be worried about Tatis. While he has absolutely gone through a rough couple of weeks, there isn’t much evidence to suggest that something is wrong with his swing or that pitchers have somehow found his Kryptonite. Every now and then, good hitters find themselves in a place where they just can’t catch a break, and it seems like he is just having one of those freak slumps. Does it suck that it’s happening right as he was about to run away with the MVP race? Sure. Is baseball less fun when he is struggling like this? I would say so. But in the long run, things will start to even out for Tatis, and we’ll see him raking as usual once again. In the meantime, all we can do is hope that he’s just saving his best stuff for his first postseason.