San Diego Padres superstar Fernando Tatis Jr. may have broken some out-dated, unwritten rules of baseball that angered an over-sensitive Texas Rangers team, but he certainly didn’t ease up on dominating them once again in the Padres completed sweep of the Rangers on Tuesday.
After he ticked off the Rangers by hitting a Grand Slam on a 3-0 pitch with his team up seven runs in the eighth inning in the game prior, Tatis collected two hard hit singles and picked up a stolen base in San Diego’s 6-4 win over Texas.
Tatis’ teammates said that the events that took headlines on Monday night “didn’t really affect us.”
“There’s unwritten rules. It is what it is,” Padres outfielder Will Myers said, according to ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez. “Some people see them a certain way. Some people see them another way. We saw it a certain way. They saw it another way. At the end of the day, it is what it is. Teams disagree. We want to go out and beat them on the field. At the end of the day, that’s what matters most. For us today, that was the whole goal.”
“It’s hard to look at that perception because being in the clubhouse, in the dugout, I feel like we’re a very tight unit,” said Padres manager Jayce Tingler.
“I feel like not only do they feel like I and the coaching staff have their back, I feel it’s mutual. I feel that they have ours as well. It is kind of hard to see it from that lens because we’re so invested in these guys.”
Tingler spoke with Tatis on Tuesday morning regarding the controversy over Monday’s game.
“We’re good,” Tingler said. “I don’t know if there’s a story that there’s gonna be a rift or anything like that, but he’s an ultra-, ultra-, super-talented player. I can’t praise him enough for just his work ethic and everything he’s done. He just continues to grow. I don’t know what to say — he’s off and on his way, and we just have to keep him going.”
