PEORIA, Ariz. — The pitch was nowhere near the plate. It never really was, not from the time it left the pitcher’s hand.
Yet Fernando Tatis Jr. swung and missed the ball. Badly.
Shown a video of his swing and miss on the slider thrown by the Rockies’ Tyler Kinley last season, Tatis sighed before listing a litany of possible reasons he swung at that offering and then a whole bunch about why he might swing at any pitch like it that from the outside looks so obviously bad.
“Sometimes it’s the mechanics, sometimes it’s the approach, sometimes it’s a pitcher doing a great job and you think otherwise,” Tatis said. “So it’s a really good mix of getting to know yourself, of getting to know the situation that’s going on, seeing the game, also reacting to the game. There’s so much stuff that it can trigger that it’s like playing chess, but like with 10 boards at the same time.”
And with less than a second allowed between moves and 40,000 people in a circle around the field making noise.
Four or five times a game against two or three or four different pitchers throwing from different angles and different speeds with different movements. Night after night after day after night.
It’s enough to make the coolest cat in uniform start talking fast and with much angst as he describes the inner turmoil that can come with trying to consistently hit in Major League Baseball.
“That’s the hardest part about baseball,” Manny Machado said. “It’s an everyday sport. So you kind of just, if you’re not mentally there, or if you’re not, like — it’s hard to be 100% focused at all times, you know. Like you lose things. You’re like, ‘OK, like my slot’s here, my hands are here, My hands are this.’ You’re thinking all this, right? Processing it. And then OK, now go do it tomorrow. Now go do it the next day, and the next day. And it’s like, ‘What was I doing three days ago?’ And then you’re like, ‘Damn, but I was doing this three days ago, But now I’m not doing it.’ And you’re like, ‘What is going on?’ And now you’re playing this, like, chicken fight, pulling one side, pulling the other side.
“I don’t want to swing at that pitch, you know, but it just looks good. Or my body is not right, or you’re like, ‘OK, my elbow is getting into that slot.’ So now you’re thinking about the elbow, and now you’re chasing that pitch because you think you can get it, because I have good hand-eye coordination and I feel like I can get to everything. So it’s just an everyday grind that you kind of, it just — I think it’s more of a mental thing, man. And I think it’s so hard to mentally be there (all the time). And I don’t think anybody does it. We all fall into it. And that’s why this game is freaking the hardest game ever.”
Follow all that? No? That’s sort of the point.
This is a story about two of the best all-around hitters in the game who sometimes look like they don’t know what they’re doing.
It is a story about how difficult it can be to hit a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher.
First, some credentials to back up that these two know what they’re talking about:
- Over the course of five big-league seasons, Tatis has never gone five games without a hit. He has gone hitless in four consecutive games just three times. Just once has he gone four games without getting on base at all. His .883 career OPS is 10th highest in the game since he entered the league in 2019.
- Machado has gone hitless in five straight games three times in 13 seasons. It has happened just once in his six years with the Padres, and there was a stay on the injured list in between the fourth and fifth games. The last of the two times Machado has gone four games without getting on base was 2017. He is the only player in the major leagues to hit at least 28 home runs in each of the past nine full seasons.
Yet the well-known recipe for the best chance of success against both Machado and Tatis is to throw hard in and soft away. Especially the latter when either of them is not in a good spot with their swing or their approach or whatever else might be going on.
Hitting is complex. The best players and coaches in the world spend a career — and even a lifetime — trying to master it. They never do. But still, it is remarkable how predictable Machado and Tatis can become when they are slumping. Or when they are hot.
When they are locked in, they rarely chase a breaking ball or offspeed pitch down and away out of the zone. Then, they go through stretches where it seems they flail at practically every one.
Both see more pitches in that area than any other single locale in or out of the strike zone.
Only once in his career has Tatis had an on-base percentage lower than .150 over a 12-game period. That was in 2023, and in that span he swung at 37% of the pitches he saw down and away out of the zone. When he came out of the slump, he batted .286 with an .811 OPS over his next 41 games. During that time, he swung at fewer than 18% of the pitches he saw down and away out of the zone.
The difference in chasing or not chasing is less dramatic with Machado. But invariably, he chases far more of those pitches when he is struggling.
“There are times you know you’re going up there and you know, ‘This guy is not going to give me anything to hit,’” Machado said. “And you swing at it and you’re like, ‘Why did I do that?’ How does that swing go from pitch to pitch? It’s the emotions of the game. There are a lot of variables.The counts, the fans cheering you on, runners on base. But you know at the end of the day you’re not going to get that pitch and then you swing. And you’re like, ‘Why did you do that?’ Now you wasted that at-bat.”
And Machado rarely chases when he is on one of his extended heaters. Moreover, he sees far fewer breaking or offspeed pitches down and away out of the zone when he is on a hot streak.
“I know what my strengths are,” Machado said. “I’m looking for that pitch.”
Problem is, hitters, including Machado and Tatis, can go a week’s worth of at-bats without seeing that pitch.
“The pitchers are good enough nowadays,” Machado said, “where they’re pinpointing and showing you different types of pitches where it looks like what you want and then they’re sliding away.”
While Machado previously alluded to some of the general reasons a hitter might swing at a pitch out of the zone that is nearly impossible to hit, the reason mentioned above is the most recurring.
“Nowadays, we’ve got all different kinds of sliders, sweepers, knuckle curves, 12-6 (curves), whatever it is, you know,” Tatis said. “It’s so varied. You can see it on the same spot and one of them is going to land on your barrel, and the other one you can see in the same spot and it’s going to land all the way outside the plate.”
The best pitchers, which is to say a lot of MLB pitchers, throw different pitches that not only break different directions but look like the same pitch until after the batter has to make a decision on what the pitch is and whether to swing.
“You need to we have less than a second to make a decision,” Tatis said.
Even just a 90 mph pitch takes less than a half-second to get to the plate. And a batter is trying to pick up the ball out of the pitcher’s hand and identify the pitch and where it is going almost immediately after release.
The pitch that breaks away from them out of the zone is especially difficult, Tatis explained, because “it’s from the same tunnel as the fastball. You need to be on time for the fastball.”
Said Padres reliever Jason Adam: “That’s why I like pitching. If I do everything right, it’s probably coming out of my hand good. Them, they can do everything right and the guy throws an extra-nasty split and they swing, it’s like — I don’t envy hitters.”
Machado and Tatis are so good they sometimes can turn around a pitch other hitters can’t. And they are so depended on by the Padres that their awareness of their talent and their importance sometimes gets the best of them.
“Effort level, trying to do too much,” hitting coach Victor Rodriguez said. “You can see that when they are anxious and they want to do more, how their body, their mechanics just get distracted, and then they start chasing. When they are under control and easy, they see the ball early. … They are so good, and they want it so bad that a lot of times they want to do a little more than what they’re capable of doing.”
There is also the matter of having two jobs.
Tatis and Machado talked about the process of trying to learn from at-bat to at-bat. They might watch their previous at-bat, talk with Rodriguez and/or just try to get into a better place mentally.
“There are so many questions you can ask yourself,” Tatis said. “Did you swing at the right pitch? Were you on time? Do you have good separation? Did you have a good load? Did you fly open? It’s baby triggers. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other. Sometimes you’ve got to go up there and (expletive) hit the ball like when you were 12 years old.”
That is something Machado and Tatis can occaisonally do because of their talent level.
But hitting is not all they have to do.
“I don’t have time to go and sit in the dugout and mentally be out of it, because I’ve got to get up in two seconds to go and play defense,” Machado said. “And now I’m playing defense, now I gotta go in, start thinking about the pitcher. So you never have that mental break. The mental break is at night when you’re sleeping, and when you wake up, you’re studying for the guy that you’re gonna face that night.”
And then it begins again.
