Tatis Jr.’s hard-hit rate resides in the 98th percentile.
His bat speed is up from last year sitting at 75 mph, also ranking at an elite level — 84th percentile.
His launch-angle, sweet-spot rate is improved from a lowly fourth percentile a year ago, to ranking 60th this year.
Barrel rate? Also strong at 11.7%.
And yet, zero home runs. None.
Tatis Jr. is now 180 plate appearances deep into his season. He’s hit at least 21 in all of his full seasons, including a career-best 42 in 2021.
“I don’t know what the (expletive) is going on,” Tatis Jr. told reporters recently. “But, man, just keep going out there and keep grinding.”
What is going on?
I employed our in-house SamCast tools and spoke with Driveline trainers, to understand what might be going on – and what could help Tatis Jr. end this curious dry spell.
“His fast-swing percentage is the fastest of his career,” Driveline hitting trainer Dylan Robertson said. “We can’t go back to when he was highly productive in ‘21, or beforehand for bat-speed stuff, but I can’t imagine that he was swinging much faster. He is hitting the ball just as hard as he was back then. So, I would definitely think it’s a lot more approach-based.”
The two biggest clues are tied to his batted ball profile.
His groundball rate has spiked to a career-high level (52%), and his pull percentage has cratered to 29%.
Even more important, his air-pull rate – never a strength – has plummeted to a paltry 5.4%. Pulled air balls are, of course, the most optimal batted-ball type in the game.
The only year Tatis Jr. was above average in air-pull percentage was 2021 (22.2%) when he hit a career-best 42 home runs.
While there’s skepticism about Tatis Jr.’s best campaigns because of a later PED suspension, he’s always had elite bat speed. What was really different about 2021 is he lifted the ball into the air to his pull side at the best rate of his career.
This year, among the 288 hitters to produce at least 20 fly balls this season, Tatis owns the third lowest rate of air pull.
What’s going on here?
Tatis closed off his stance more this year, from standing 32 degrees open last year to just 9 degrees this season.
“It almost seems like he’s trying to push balls the opposite way for whatever reason,” Robertson said. “His stance is, I think it’s something crazy like 20 degrees more closed compared to last year. I would say that is the big thing… You got his average point of contact is deeper, his attack angles much lower. I think the biggest thing is, his path is more of a byproduct of that. There’s probably a little bit of an attempt to kind of go the other way, for whatever reason.
“He’s just late.”
As Robertson explained, his setup with his lower half is in part affecting how his bat travels through the zone.
The best hitters have always known the importance of contact locations and optimal paths. But we’re able to quantify the importance of these traits today which, should allow hitters to more quickly break out of bad habits and slumps.
If we can measure it, we can train it – we can improve upon it.
“The biggest thing is like the depth of contact is deeper. The attack angle is significantly lower,” Robertson said. “The direction is significantly further to the opposite field. Unfortunately, we don’t have bat-tracking data from when he was at his best, you know, in ‘21. But even just looking back from the second half of ‘23, his attack angle is cut in half. It was 12 degrees. It’s six now.”
For some reason, Tatis Jr. is doing the opposite of what led him to his best season – getting the ball in the air to his pull side.
As we can see in evaluating SamCast data, so many of his swing traits and metrics are trending in the wrong direction from where they were in recent years.