Fernando Tatis Jr. Still Stuck on 0 Homers in 148 Plate Appearances
fernando tatis jr has gone 36 games without a home run, even though the Padres outfielder has already piled up 12 barrels in 148 plate appearances. The 27-year-old’s power drought is the sharpest early-season split in his line, especially after he entered Wednesday slugging.305.
Tatis Jr. and the empty homer total
The raw output is stark: six extra-base hits, no home runs, and a.250/.320/.305 slash line through 34 games. That leaves him 20% worse than league average at the plate by wRC+, a level far below the production he has delivered in recent healthy seasons.
Yet the swing metrics do not point to a player missing the ball entirely. Tatis ranks in the 99th percentile in hard-hit rate and owns a.280 expected batting average, which sits in the 82nd percentile. If he keeps barreling the ball at a 12.5% clip, he is expected to get on the board before long.
Hard contact, wrong launch
The problem is where those balls are going. His career-high 52.1% groundball rate has cut into damage, and his 16.7% lift rate is paired with a career-low 5.2% mark for pulling the ball in the air. He is also going up the middle 46.9% of the time and using the opposite field on 32.3% of his batted balls.
That mix explains why the contact quality has not shown up in the home run column. Tatis also has a 28.1% line drive rate, the best of his career, and a 3.1% pop-up rate, so the ball is being struck cleanly enough — just not in the air often enough to turn into over-the-fence power.
Padres power with context
The drought stands out because this is not a player built around singles. Tatis hit 42 home runs in 2021, then exactly 25 in each of his two full seasons after that. He missed all of 2022 because of injuries and an 80-game PED suspension, lost two months in 2024 to a stress fracture in his leg, and still finished with 21 home runs in 102 games.
He is not the only one to linger in this odd lane. Luis Rengifo had the second-most barrels without a home run with six, and Jose Tena had the most barrels without a home run last season with six. For Tatis, the profile says the drought should not last much longer, but the Padres still need the extra-base production to start showing up in the place that counts most.
