'He goes, we go': With their backs against the wall, Padres look to Fernando Tatis Jr.

WITH TWO HEARTBREAKS behind him and a mountain ahead of him, San Diego Padres manager Craig Stammen was asked about the challenge of taking three consecutive National League Division Series games against the 103-win Milwaukee Brewers. He pointed to the regular season, during which the Padres went from floundering in July to percolating in August to dominating by September. "We've been resilient all year," Stammen said before a Monday workout at Petco Park, ahead of Tuesday's Game 3. "We've had our backs against the wall several times. Players, individually, have had their backs against the wall." No player represents that better than the Padres' most important one. Fernando Tatis Jr. did not hit his first home run until May 30 and somehow finished with 25 homers. Fifty games into the Padres' season, he ranked 165th among 171 qualified players in slugging percentage. By the end of it, he was slashing .289/.350/.470. "It was determination," Tatis said. "It would've been easy just to get carried over by the emotions and say it was a bad year, but, man, we just kept working." To rediscover his form, Tatis had to tap into old mechanics and overhaul his swing. He had to lean on a former hitting coach and a future Hall of Famer. Mostly, though, Tatis had to pick himself up and rally like never before. He went from looking like a lost cause to putting together what he believes is the best stretch of his life, a mesmerizing two-month surge that coincided with the Padres' rise. The apex occurred in the Padres' postseason opener seven days ago, in front of a sold-out, frenzied Petco Park crowd, when Tatis hit the first pitch he saw 405 feet for a leadoff home run and later raced home to score on an attempted steal of second base. Since then, Tatis is 1-for-14. And though the two losses in Milwaukee were defined by Ty France's roof-interrupted fly ball and Mason Miller's blown save, the reality is the Padres scored just five runs and went 3-for-18 with runners in scoring position against the Brewers' pitchers. Since the division series moved to its current 2-2-1 format, only three of the 36 teams that lost the first two games on the road won the series. For the Padres to become the fourth, their offense will have to get going. And that starts with Tatis. As Padres shortstop Xander Bogaerts said: "He goes, we go." TATIS WENT 2-FOR-4 with a grand slam in a pool play game against Israel on March 9, lifting his OPS to 1.567 through the first three games of the World Baseball Classic. The next day, when the Dominican team reconvened for a workout, Tatis was toying with a new approach. Albert Pujols, his manager for the international tournament, couldn't believe it. "He changes a lot, man," Pujols said in Spanish. "And that affects him a lot." Making constant tweaks, often unnecessarily, has been a common theme, one he readily acknowledges, throughout Tatis' career. Tatis is supremely athletic, with ample range of motion. But sometimes, he said, those traits can be "a curse." "I'm able to do all these things," Tatis said. "But at the same time, it's: How do you pick which one is going to work at the moment?" When the regular season began, Tatis chose a closed stance, one he had experimented with from time to time over the past few years. He wanted to limit the moving parts of his load, make his swing more efficient and give himself a chance to hit for a higher batting average. Instead, Tatis said, "My body was just getting stuck with my swing. I was getting off my back foot. I wasn't loading and separating in a way that would benefit me to hit the ball the right way." Tatis produced elite exit velocities through the season's first two months, but he was beating pitches into the ground and hardly lifting them to his pull side. It was the middle of May. His batting average was in the low .200s, his slugging percentage was among the lowest in the sport and his home run total was stuck at zero. It was around then that Pujols checked in. "That kid was so down, man," Pujols said. "It was ugly. And that worried me a lot. And that's why I started communicating more with him." Fourteen years ago, Pujols went through something similar. He had signed a 10-year, $240 million contract with the Los Angeles Angels, then put together one of the best spring training performances he could remember. But when the games started to count, he lost his swing. Pujols didn't hit his first home run in an Angels uniform until May 6. By the end of the year, though, the production was there. It took three months for him to put up the numbers he needed to for an entire season. Pujols relayed that story to Tatis. If I could do it, Pujols told him, so can you. "The way he talked," Tatis said, "putting me in sentences with his name -- 'players like us, we can do it.' Stuff like that, it can really lift you up." Tatis needed the confidence boost. But mostly, he needed help with his mechanics. For the better part of two weeks, he communicated with Pujols almost daily. Tatis would send him video, and Pujols would send him more, often putting together split screens of Tatis' old swing side by side with his current one. Pujols wanted Tatis to focus on loading into his back leg. "He was hitting the ball hard because he's strong," Pujols said. "But his hips weren't working the way they're supposed to. He was using too much of his upper body. And sometimes, that also makes you late to the ball. He'd hit it hard, but he was late. And he was fouling off balls that he normally would put in the seats." By May 30, 393 players had hit a home run, and Tatis was not one of them. In the fifth inning of that night's game in Washington, D.C., right-hander Foster Griffin threw a 91 mph fastball low and in and Tatis drove it 451 feet, raising his hands in celebration and relief. It was his first home run, but also his 13th hit in a stretch of 23 at-bats. He was generating power with his lower half again. His swing was better equipped for pulling pitches into the air. Not long after that, Pujols called to tell him he would circle back in three months. "Don't let me go!" Tatis told him. "Nah," Pujols recalled saying, "we'll talk in September. Your numbers will be there." TATIS STILL WASN'T a finished product. And nobody knew that better than Raúl Padrón. Before being promoted to the major league coaching staff this offseason, Padrón spent 10 years in the Padres' minor league system making various stops as a hitting coach, some of them while Tatis was ascending through the system. In 2018, when a 19-year-old Tatis finished April with a .177 batting average in Double-A, Padrón helped him get back on track. Along the way, he became one of his most trusted advisors. And so, on May 21, an off day before a weekend home series against the Athletics, Padres general manager A.J. Preller, Stammen and the team's four hitting coaches decided Tatis needed just one voice from the team, and that one voice needed to be Padrón. Seeing results over the next few days, most notably a home run, was encouraging. But throughout June, their work remained. The first task was to open Tatis' stance again, allowing him to reintroduce his higher leg kick. Said Tatis: "It was all about fluidity." Padrón's focus wasn't so much on mechanics but rather on helping Tatis "find the rhythm of his body." "We needed to find a way for the body to work the way it always works -- with his leg kick, opening up a little bit," Padrón said in Spanish. "That gets him a little bit more into his legs, and obviously, the strength is in your legs. He's never been a hitter focused on mechanics. He's always been about rhythm with great IQ in the batter's box. He doesn't need to be thinking about a bunch of things to get a hit." The extra work in the batting cage continued. The conversations did, too. The results were starting to match. Tatis slashed .318/.356/.509 with four home runs in June, but Padrón wasn't seeing what he needed to yet. Before Tatis departed for the All-Star break, Padrón left him with a thought: Remember to stay loose, especially with your upper body. He told him to stand in front of a mirror and practice it. By the time the Padres began their second half in Kansas City on the weekend of July 17, Padrón said, "Everything had changed." "His mind was at peace. He was more relaxed, more willing to take things as they come, whether it was a good result or not. He started to let his talent work for him." Tatis stayed hot through July and August and took it to another level in September. Only two players, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Pete Alonso, hit more home runs than Tatis' 20 after the All-Star break. He slashed .307/.385/.610 and put up 3.7 FanGraphs wins above replacement, tied for second highest in the majors. Tatis believes it was the best stretch of his career. Many around him agree. "It would have been easy for him to look up after a couple of months, 'Hey, maybe not my year, maybe not my season,'" Preller said. "There was none of that, no quit from his standpoint. It was, 'I'm going to figure this out.'" The Padres took off down the stretch, going a major league-best 35-17 in August and September while scoring the third-most runs. Jackson Merrill turned around his season, France became a steady presence in the middle of the lineup, and Dustin Harris, Samad Taylor and Ethan Salas emerged. But the Padres' surge coinciding with Tatis unlocking the best version of himself is no coincidence. Along the way, Tatis learned something about himself -- something the Padres hope will carry over with their season on the brink. "That I'm always here," he said. "In this game, I'm never out of it. In a season, in a baseball season, I'm never out of it."