Fernando Tatis Jr. is starting to look more like himself -- here's why 

Slowly, Fernando Tatis Jr. is starting to look like himself again.

It’s not just because he literally looks like his old self in the batter’s box -- though we’ll get to that in a moment. Really, it’s that Tatis is hitting. That’s what matters. Since May 18, Tatis has a 148 wRC+, a fancy metric that means his offensive production has been 48% better than league average. That’s a top 30 wRC+ in baseball, in that span. His OPS has improved from .609 in March/April to .713 in May to .800 in June.

You don’t have to squint to see that something is working here. Likewise, the last time that we checked in on Tatis at the beginning of May, you didn’t have to look too hard to see that something was wrong. As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello explored, Tatis' hard contact often came on the ground or to the opposite field, spurring a relatively shocking power outage. A turnaround, Petriello wrote, would require some major changes.

That’s starting to happen now.

“I feel like I’ve been hitting the ball hard since the beginning of the year, and finally got some holes here and there to get my knocks in,” Tatis said earlier this week in St. Louis. “At the end of the day, there’s no secrets. You just go out there and compete and give the best you can every single day.”

That’s right, there are no secrets here. We can see, in part, why Tatis is starting to find those holes.

It sure helps that Tatis is still scorching the ball. His 53.0% hard-hit rate is a top-15 mark in the Majors, and he’s posting a 59.2% hard-hit rate in June.

But it’s more so about where and how he’s hitting these hard-hit balls. Remember, Tatis had one of the highest hard-hit rates in baseball when he was stuck on zero home runs. That’s because he wasn’t pulling the ball, and he sure wasn’t pulling the ball in the air -- the sort of batted ball that most easily allows a hitter to tap into their power.

We have seen this play out in real time. In March/April, Tatis pulled the ball just 21.2% of the time. In May, his pull rate surged to 33.2% -- that’s good, and it likely reflects a change in approach. But the issue wasn’t resolved, because too many of his batted balls to the pull side were also on the ground. His pull air rate was still under 10% for the month of May, making it one of the five lowest single-month pull air rates of his career (the 5.9% pull air rate he posted in March/April '26 is the lowest).

On May 30, Tatis launched his first home run of the year, a majestic blast that sailed 451 feet into left field. He’s run a 16.1% pull air rate since. That’s above his career average pull air rate of 14.9%.

Across his first 50 games, Tatis had one extra-base hit to the pull side. He has six over his last 22 games.

“We feel pretty good about what he’s done for us from the leadoff spot,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said. “He’s kind of been very patient, but also very aggressive in certain spots. He’s playing the game really well right now.”

This doesn’t just happen by accident. Tatis has changed his stance in the batter’s box. Last year, he had one of the most open stances in baseball, at 38° open (neutral is 0°). Tatis started the season with a far more closed-off stance, making a huge jump to a 3° open stance.

Now, Tatis is back to having one of the most open stances in the game, with a 33° open stance in June.

We can pinpoint when this change happened. On May 13, with the Padres finishing off a three-game series in Milwaukee against the Brewers, Tatis had a 5° open stance. Two days later, in Seattle against the Mariners, Tatis’ stance was 32° open. He has not gone back. He's posted a 130 wRC+ since, which is in line with his production in 2025 (131 wRC+) and 2024 (135 wRC+). You can see how his feet and lower half are positioned differently at different points in the season below.

A lot of this is a feel thing -- hitters will often explain their position in the batter’s box by noting it’s where they feel most comfortable. But this is also intentional. Hitters don’t have much control -- that belongs to the pitcher. They do, though, have control over where they stand. That alone makes these adjustments noteworthy.

Tatis is also swinging the bat faster than he has at any point over the last few years. He bumped his bat speed by two full ticks from March/April to May, raising it to 76.4 mph. It's 75.8 mph in June. Those are his two fastest-swinging months on record, since Statcast first released bat-tracking data following the 2023 All-Star break. Combined with his open stance, that’s likely helping him catch up to fastballs. He hit .148 with zero extra-base hits off four-seamers in March/April, and is hitting .405 with a .524 SLG against fastballs since May 1.

Not everything is fixed here. The power isn’t all the way back -- not for a player who has hit 20+ home runs in five of his six big league seasons, and slugged 17 home runs in 59 games in the pandemic-shortened season in 2020. Tatis still owns the eighth-highest percentage of hits going 200 feet or less.

“It’s the big leagues, so it’s never going to be easy, you know?” Tatis said. “You just go out there and trying to find a way to help your team in every single way possible.”

He’s been doing a lot more of that lately.

Jeff Jones contributed to the reporting of this story.