The reasons Fernando Tatis Jr. still doesn't have a home run for the Padres originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

There are layers to the fact that Fernando Tatis Jr. still hasn't hit a home run this season for the San Diego Padres.

It's relatively simple to point to a few statistics that line up with the fact that Tatis hasn't left the yard yet.

But the overall why? That's not as easy to solve.

The simple part is this: Tatis is hitting the ball on the ground more than he ever has in his career.

And then this: Tatis is pulling the ball less than he ever has in his career.

The simplest way to hit a home run is to pull the ball in the air. Tatis simply isn't doing that.

"Tatis is in the midst of the longest home run drought of his career -- 139 plate appearances spanning back to last season -- and he owns a .665 OPS through 31 games this year despite posting the second-highest hard-hit rate among qualifiers at 63.6%," MLB.com's Thomas Harrigan wrote in a new article this weekend. "While he has been hitting rockets, he hasn’t been producing contact that’s conducive to slugging, recording the lowest pull and fly-ball rates of his career. At some point, though, the dam is going to break."

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That key figure pointed out by Harrigan, that Tatis still has an immense hard-hit rate, is a lot of reason for optimism.

But still, Tatis has to optimize his contact to give himself a better chance to hit the home runs that he currently isn't hitting.

Videos have been circulating on social media of the way Tatis' swing seems to change year to year, and maybe his ever-tinkering nature has set back his power swing to some extent so far this season.

There's time to turn things around, but it's one of the most unexpected quirks of the 2026 campaign so far: Tatis still hasn't homered, and no one saw that coming.

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