Can Fernando Tatis Jr. fix baseball?

Major League Baseball has spent decades trying to figure out how to attract a younger audience, and they may have found the answer in San Diego.

I’ve always had an issue with faith, one that can probably be traced back to my childhood, and it makes me more of a pessimist than I’d like to be. I tend to believe that anything that I want to happen, even things that appear like they’re going to happen, can’t possibly happen.

“The system will crush that thing before it ever turns into what everyone wants,” is usually how my brain responds when someone tries to tell me that someone or something that I love is so great that it’s going to change how the entire system works.

That’s a long way of saying that I never actually believed that the San Diego Padres could make baseball fun and exciting in a way that no team had in ages, even though I wanted it to happen.

But, here we are. The Padres aren’t just the hottest team in baseball, they are the breath of fresh air that Major League Baseball has needed for a very long time. And a lot of the credit has to be given to Fernando Tatis Jr.

How they play

MLB is aware that their sport has gotten boring. Too many strikeouts and not enough action has led the league to experiment in the minor leagues with changes that could some day be implemented at the top level to generate more excitement.

Several of those changes are very obviously meant to get teams to start stealing more bases, because stolen bases are very exciting. Or, in other words, several of those changes are meant to get other teams to start playing the way the Padres do.

Not only do the Padres lead all of MLB in steals (and steal attempts) by a mile, but most of the best teams in baseball (according to their record) steal as little as possible. The Padres’ 50 stolen bases in 2021 are more than the Dodgers, Braves, Astros and Yankees combined.

In addition to stealing a lot, the Padres are on base a lot (4th in OBP) and in scoring position a lot. It’s a more exciting game when any type of hit can bring in a run and the team/fans aren’t just hoping for a home run.

How they celebrate

For ages, I have been complaining about MLB missing out on all the fun. Watch baseball almost anywhere else, Korea or Japan or Cuba or Mexico, and you’ll see a game filled with celebrations and taunting.

Hell, maybe my favorite thing about the World Baseball Classic is exactly this. Teams dye their hair blonde, fans dance and sing nonstop, home runs are followed by incredible bat flips, and strike outs come with shouts of elation from the pitcher.

The baseball players are allowed to have fun, to emote completely, instead of being concerned with the supposed unwritten rules of baseball. Since bringing this baseball to the forefront of American baseball viewership during the WBC, it’s obvious that the league has been dying to find an MLB superstar that would play this way.

And now, they have one:

This isn’t my favorite Tatis batflip, and it’s before he added a little shuffle to his home run trot, but I love that this is posted to the official MLB YouTube channel and the description is: “No one in the league does it with the type of flare and swag as Fernando Tatis Jr.”

In a word, Fernando Tatis Jr. is the perfect player for baseball today. He is the most talented position player in the sport, but I think just as important is that he’s the best celebrator in the sport.

Whether it’s Tatis screaming in ecstasy when he gets in under a tag at home plate, or flipping his bat, or throwing his hair back before he’s even done stealing second base, or his dancing…..actually, let’s stop there. Let’s talk about the dancing for a second.

There are a lot of players that want to be Fernando Tatis Jr., even before any of us knew he existed. They want to break the unwritten rules. They want to make baseball fun. They want to be the one that all the kids fall in love with, the one that brings kids back to baseball.

But, the general public has a pretty good sense of who is doing it to try and accomplish something and who is doing it because it is genuinely who they are. Everything Tatis does on the field feels like something he would be doing even if nobody was watching. It feels like he’s just the right person, and the right player, at the right time. Not manufactured.

And that’s why so many people that have been waiting for fun to be infused back into baseball are ready to go all-in on Tatis in ways that they haven’t been since the unfortunate death of Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez.

How it looks / Who is watching

The thing about being cool, especially in a sport that has literally crafted unwritten and unbreakable rules that are meant to keep everyone from having fun, is that the old people that lived by those rules for so long are going to hate you for it.

For so long, baseball has wondered why the age of their average fan has continued to go up. Now, those average fans have turned Tatis and the Padres into villains, for their dancing and their gold chains and their bat flips and their hair and their overall swag.

Meanwhile, MLB sees the young fans that it’s needed for decades showing up because the San Diego Padres feel relatable to them. Even in the stands at Petco Park you can see that average age of attendees being lower than in years past. This is a breakthrough. This is transition.

Fernando Tatis Jr. and the San Diego Padres are making baseball cool again by breaking all of the rules. Nobody asked them to do it. None of it was really done on purpose. It was just the young, brash Padres being encouraged by the organization to be who they are.

It’s funny when you can see the actual flashbulb moment that switch was flipped, too.

Tatis swings at a 3-0 pitch in a blowout game, hits a grand slam, and the world turns upside down. You all remember this happening.

And the initial reaction was the bad one. “Oh no! He broke an unwritten rule!” Jayce Tingler said what Tatis did was wrong and that it wouldn’t happen again. Tatis himself gave a press conference where he apologized for swinging a bat at a baseball even though that’s literally his job. I felt like it was going to strangle the fun right out of this team.

Then Jayce Tingler changed his tune. He and A.J. Preller said they weren’t going to restrict Tatis. They weren’t going to get in the way of who he was. If he wanted to swing 3-0 in a blowout game, and dance around the basepaths, he could do it.

What happened next was the team responding to being let off the leash. Three more grand slams were hit in the team’s next three games, all by the Padres, and “Slam Diego” was born. The moment turned around the 2020 season for the Padres and set in motion who the team was going to be: Loud, proud, and fun as hell.

Who they are

The best part of all of this, which admittedly has been mostly focused on the hot-as-lava Fernando Tatis Jr., is that contract. Well, those two contracts.

Manny Machado signed a 10-year contract with the Padres, who were not thought of as a free agent destination, and vowed to take the sad sack Padres to championship contention. Not only has he been an excellent player on the field, earning MVP votes in 2020, but he has changed the culture around the team.

Manny is the veteran leader of the team, but he’s also familiar with being a baseball villain. He’s been an excellent guy to have around at this moment, showing all of the younger players on the team that being the villain does not hurt your future earnings. He’s a testament to just being yourself, your honest self, and letting the rest of baseball figure it out instead of trying to conform to what the fans think they want.

Then Fernando Tatis Jr. signed a 14-year contract with the Padres, taking away any talk about his eventual free agency and allowing him to focus on playing baseball. It also allows for the Padres fans to love him completely, knowing that he wants to be here and not simply that the team owns his rights.

SWAG CHAIN

The two biggest stars in the Padres dugout really do seem to enjoy being San Diego Padres. Since arriving, the team has won its first playoff series in decades and gone from laughingstock to legitimate championship contender. They currently sit in 1st place in the NL West, and are the only team in baseball with 30 wins.

Also, since those two got here, the Padres have changed their logo, colors, and uniform. In almost every sense of the word, the team has transformed into something better than it used to be. Something more fun, more brash, more unique, and filled with promise.

Lots of people are paying attention, too. Not just the Padres fans. Not just San Diego. Not just baseball fans. How do you get younger fans to watch baseball for the first time? To test it out and fall in love with it? You find yourself a player like Fernando Tatis Jr.