El Nino
Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a baseball out of Dodger Stadium on Thursday
It’s September. We’ve seen A LOT of home runs this MLB season. Pitcher home runs, hitter home runs. Dome runs and moonshots. Line drives, oppo tacos, grand slams, walk offs. We’ve seen 48 alone from A CATCHER and 5,830 total with a handful of games left to play in the regular season. That’s a lot of dingers, dongs, bombs, and blasts. But not a single one has slackened the jaw quite like the nuke that Fernando Tatis Jr. hit out of Dodger Stadium on Thursday night. Yes, we said out.
My word. Has that ever been done? Surely sometime between Dodger Stadium’s opening in 1962 and now someone must have smoked one into the parking lot, but we can’t remember it and neither can the broadcasters, who have presumably forgotten 10 times more about baseball than we’ll ever know. When the dust settled and the windshield glass was swept up, El Nino’s homer measured in at a whopping 467 feet with an exit velo of 116.6 mph. Even if that’s not the longest or strongest home run hit this season, together those numbers, in concert with the ball’s unceremonious exit from the premises, combine to make this one of the most impressive dingers of the MLB season.
Unfortunately for the Friars, none of it matters. Slam Diego, last year’s most exciting baseball team and preseason World Series contenders, have crashed and burned in the second half. The cracks have shown, the star power hasn’t, and last week they were eliminated from postseason contention with over 10 days of the season left to play. Tatis Jr.’s homer on Thursday, for all its glitz and glamour, was the last run the Padres would score on evening, eventually losing to the Dodgers 8-3. If that doesn’t put a nice, neat little bow on the 2021 Padres, then we don’t know what does.