Fernando Tatis Jr. was available to hit on Sunday.
Padres manager Mike Shildt made that clear in no uncertain terms after a 6-2 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers snapped the team’s four-game winning streak.
His right fielder still has not required imaging, Shildt confirmed again while making sure to state that he was speaking of his left elbow.
“He was having trouble straightening it,” Shildt said, “but the elbow wasn’t holding him back.”
And how about that right quad?
“It’s something that we’re still evaluating,” Shildt said.
In fact, the team’s questions about at least Tatis’ short-term status were serious enough to fly switch-hitting outfielder Bryce Johnson in from Triple-A El Paso as a contingency plan that was up in the air until roughly an hour before the game.
In the end, Tatis was not pushed to the injured list, but Shildt stopped short of saying that his availability as a bat off the bench on Sunday was a clear sign of progress.
“Listen, we’re still making internal decisions, discussions, including with him and our medical group,” Shildt said. “We’ll have a little more clarity on what that looks like moving forward with his path.”
Tatis has not been made available to the media since exiting Friday’s game, two innings after a pitch struck him in the left elbow. He left Petco Park on Sunday before the clubhouse opened for post-game availability.
Entering Sunday, nobody in the NL had played more games than Tatis (80). All but one of his starts have been in right field, but it became public on Tuesday that he’d been playing through right quad soreness when he had his first full day off of the season in Philadelphia.
Tatis returned to the lineup with a 1-for-5 game on Wednesday and homered during a four-hit day on Thursday before exiting Friday’s game with what the team called a triceps contusion.
That injury, however, had improved to the point where Shildt said he could have used Tatis as a bat off the bench on Sunday.
“He’s available to hit today,” Shildt said after the game. “There was a couple of different moments where we’re just like a hitter away or a matchup away. Wasn’t going to do it just to do it. And even in the sixth there was a window for that, just didn’t present itself to get to that spot.”
Tatis remains day-to-day.
Plate coverage
Perhaps no one was happier to see Brett Sullivan arrive this weekend than Tyler Wade, who’d joked earlier this season that things would have to have gone seriously off the rails if he was ever seen in catcher’s gear.
Yet there Wade was on Friday with the gear on in early work, as was the case in New York on the previous road trip. Later that night, Wade ran out behind the plate for warmup pitches from Dylan Cease while Kyle Higashioka put his gear on after an at-bat.
“I wasn’t stealing any strikes, but I was catching the baseball,” Wade said. “He threw the whole thing. He was ripping sliders, curveballs, everything.”
To date, Wade has played every position in the majors except first base and catcher. To be clear, he’s not quite racing to the front of the line to catch games … “but I will,” Wade said. “If the team needs me, I will.”
Notable
As he forecast after leaving Friday’s game with continued discomfort in his left knee, Jurickson Profar returned to the lineup in left field and went 1-for-4 with a double and a run scored. In fact, it was the third straight game in which Profar has doubled, tied for a career high. Before Thursday, Profar had not had a double in his previous nine games.
- 1B Luis Arraez’s run-scoring single in the fifth inning gave him an NL-leading 32 multi-hit games this season. It was his first multi-hit game since Wednesday in Philadelphia. Arraez hasn’t gone more than four games without a multi-hit game all season.
- Sullivan’s fifth-inning bunt single was his first hit in the majors since a two-hit game in San Francisco on Sept. 27, 2023.