After an unlucky bike accident took the primary half of Fernando Tatís Jr.‘s season from us, many baseball followers had been getting hyped to see him return to motion. He was pimping house run balls within the minors and hitting heckling followers with that signature “can’t contact me” angle that many Padres followers love and lots of rival followers like to hate. With Juan Soto becoming a member of forces with NL MVP candidate Manny Machado in Petco Park, the Padres had been setting themselves as much as be a devastating offense that would contend for an NL crown with division rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Then this occurred.
The lengthy arm of the MLB regulation got here down exhausting on Tatís, hitting him with an 80-game suspension for violating the league’s PED coverage. That’s a typical suspension for a first-time offender. Nothing to see there.
The one query now could be how badly does this suspension harm the Padres’ World Sequence probabilities?
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Fairly rattling exhausting if I do say so.
There’s no denying that the Padres will make the playoffs. They’ve established themselves as top-of-the-line groups within the Nationwide League all season lengthy regardless of the absence of Tatís. However when the playoffs roll round, the Padres are going to want Tatís’s highly effective bat to maintain up with groups just like the Dodgers, Braves, and Mets.
Whereas house runs are already accountable for a lot of the scoring within the common season, they develop into all of the extra necessary within the playoffs as groups usually solely throw out their greatest pitchers. That means so as to add to the scoreboard rapidly is what makes a crew all of the extra harmful in October. Tatís is without doubt one of the greatest within the league at hitting dingers. Hell, he led the Senior Circuit in that class final yr. The Padres’ present shortstop, Ha-Seong Kim has 6 house runs and a .695 OPS. Whereas that’s nonetheless ok for a 101 OPS-plus, making him an ever so barely above-average hitter, it’s a far cry from the worth that Tatís would deliver.
The Padres are simply not on the identical degree because the Dodgers with out their star shortstop. They simply received swept by the Dodgers for goodness sake and that was after the trades for Soto, Hader, Bell, and Drury.
The Dodgers have extra playoff expertise, a greater group of younger stars so as to add to their 40-man roster down the stretch, and can seemingly have the higher file come the playoffs, giving them a first-round bye, and home-field benefit ought to these groups meet up within the NLDS or CS.
Tatís would’ve offered a much-needed spark for a crew who has gone 2-8 in opposition to the Dodgers this yr. Sadly, the Dodgers will maintain the benefit for the remainder of the season. I’m not saying the Padres’ season is over, however the Dodgers maintain an enormous higher hand now.
