Fernando Tatis Jr. finally hits first HR of season with 451-foot monster vs. Nationals
Fernando Tatis Jr., once one of MLB’s top power bats, finally has his first homer of the season. It took him until May 30.
In the first inning of the San Diego Padres’ game against the Washington Nationals on Saturday, Tatis crushed a fastball deep into the left-field stands at Nationals Park to end a bizarre homer-less streak. Per Statcast, the ball was measured at 451 feet, reportedly his longest since 2021.
He celebrated the occasion with a bat flip.
The Padres dugout enthusiastically celebrated the moment.
Tatis’ power outage had become one of the more curious stories of the 2026 MLB season. It has been a while since Tatis led the NL in homers with 42 in 2021 — which predated his PED suspension and a string of injuries — but he still posted at least 20 over the last three seasons and remains one of the faces of the Padres.
It’s also not like Tatis had wasn’t hitting the ball hard. He entered Saturday ranked 11th in balls hit at least 95 mph, per Baseball Savant, and 27th in bat speed out of 213 players.
The rub was that while Tatis still had bat speed, he was hitting balls into the dirt at a rate never before seen in his career. He ranked 13th in MLB in groundball rate entering Saturday and saw his launch angle go from a healthy 10.0 in 2024 and 9.4 in 2025 to 0.9 in 2026.
But even that doesn’t fully explain why Tatis was sitting at zero homers entering Saturday. Among the 12 players with a higher groundball rate than Tatis this season, all but one (leader Chandler Simpson) have at least one homer this season. Among those players, only two of them (Garrett Mitchell and Edgar Quero) had a higher average exit velocity than him.
It was a baffling trend, and one that coincided with a career-worst season at the plate and a collective power outage for the Padres, who had the second-lowest slugging percentage in MLB before Saturday.
