Padres notes: Bad timing for Fernando Tatis Jr., bad call for Xander Bogaerts

CHICAGO — Fernando Tatis Jr. homered on the first pitch he saw of the postseason last year, the start of a white-hot October that carried the Padres to the brink of an NLCS berth.

What Tatis did this week was not, well, “just not fun,” he said after the Padres’ 3-1 loss to the Cubs on Thursday. Just not fun at all. We definitely missed an opportunity.”

Indeed.

For all that went right with the bullpen in three games and even after the shortest start of Yu Darvish’s career, the demise of the 2025 Padres can be pinned on their inability to score more than five runs across three day games at Wrigley Field.

Manny Machado put the finishing touches on Wednesday’s win with a two-run homer after Tatis’ fifth-inning walk. The only other home run of the series was Jackson Merrill’s ninth-inning solo shot on Thursday, the start of a rally that fizzled after bringing the go-ahead run to the plate.

Plenty will be said about the six-seven-eight grouping of the left-handed-hitting Ryan O’Hearn, Gavin Sheets and Jake Cronenworth going a combined 3-for-26 while facing mostly left-handers.

But the Padres also needed superstar moments beyond Machado’s home run on Wednesday and Tatis’ acrobatic catch in right field to help save that game, and Tatis did not show up like he did last year while hitting four home runs en route to a 1.500 OPS across seven playoff games.

This time around, Tatis went 1-for-12 with a walk, a steal and two runs scored. He also struck out four times, including three times Thursday while seeing just 14 pitches. He struck out in his first two at-bats while swinging at all six pitches, four of them clearly out of the strike zone.

“I wasn’t picking (up) the ball that first two at-bats,” Tatis said. “I feel like that was pretty obvious. Just the wrong approach, wrong approach at the plate. And definitely bad timing for it.”

The poor finish capped an up-and-down year.

Tatis had MVP-caliber numbers — eight homers and a 1.011 OPS — after the first month of the season, went through long, curious power outages in the middle months and was starting to click again when a bout with COVID-19 sidelined him for the first three games of the final homestand.

Tatis homered twice over the final weekend of the regular season to bring his season total to 25. It was hardly enough to satisfy him, especially given the way the Padres’ postseason ended.

“I need to pick it up,” Tatis said. “I need to be more consistent. It was definitely not good what I did out there on the offensive side, and I definitely need to clean it up as soon as possible.”

An ABS lobbyist

Xander Bogaerts pushed himself to return quickly from the fracture in his left foot and wound up accounting for quite a bit of traffic this week, as he tied for the team lead with four hits in the series. He doubled in Game 1, beat out a couple of infield hits to stress that left foot and even swiped second base after leading off the seventh inning with his lone hit in Thursday’s loss.

An opportunity to do more after Merrill’s leadoff homer in the ninth, though, was taken away from him when plate umpire D.J. Reyburn rung him up looking on a 3-2 fastball that crossed the plate well below the strike zone.

Bogaerts slammed his bat immediately after the call.

He was still not happy with the call after Freddy Fermín flied out to end the game with runners on second and third.

“Talk about it now: what do you want me to do?” Bogaerts said. “It’s a ball. Messed up the whole game, you know? I mean, can’t go back in time and talking about it now won’t change anything. So it was bad, and thank God for ABS next year, because this is terrible.”

Instant replay overturned several calls this series.

Next year, batters, catchers and pitchers will have the right to challenge pitches they disagree with via an automated ball-strike system that had been in play in the minors for several years and used during spring training.

Based on the strike zone displayed on MLB’s Gameday app, Bogaerts absolutely would have won a challenge and walked to follow Merrill’s homer.