SAN DIEGO — Eight years before he went two months without a home run, eroding his confidence and his standing as one of baseball’s best players, Fernando Tatis Jr. endured an even worse start to a season.He ended that April with a .177 average and a .564 OPS. He was a 19-year-old shortstop, and inside the batter’s box, the youngest player in the Texas League looked his age.“Too much rotation,” Tatis recalled this week. “Just spinning, getting off my back leg. It was a complete mess.”That memory feels especially relevant now. Eight years later, the San Diego Padres right fielder spent the first third of this season grasping for his swing — only this time, he had the benefit of knowing where to look.Tatis failed to record a home run until May 30. Since then, he has 20. Among position players in that span, only Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong and Arizona Diamondbacks catcher Gabriel Moreno have outpaced him in fWAR. For more than three months, Tatis has carried an up-and-down offense that could soon determine whether the Padres advance to the postseason.Ty France said of Fernando Tatis Jr.: “When he believes that he’s one of the best players in the game, he goes out and plays like it.” (Orlando Ramirez / Getty Images)His turnaround began with recognizing what had gone wrong. Not unlike in April 2018, Tatis was shifting his weight incorrectly and working around the baseball rather than through it. The contact was usually loud, as it had been throughout his career. Too often, however, it ended in a pull-side grounder or a slicing trajectory.The solution was more complicated than simply telling Tatis to pull the ball in the air, the ideal outcome in the modern game. Attempting to force such a result can narrow a hitter’s vision and leave him vulnerable to pitches he might otherwise handle.“When you’re trying to pull a fastball, you’re basically eliminating anything off-speed on the outer half of the plate, which he was getting a lot of,” said Steven Souza Jr., the Padres’ first-year hitting coach and a former big-league outfielder.Instead, Tatis needed to trust his instincts again. The objective was to clean up his direction and bat path, then let his natural ability take over.What followed was a process, not a revelation. Tatis worked daily with Padres hitting instructor Raul Padron, who first coached him in Double A in 2018. In late June, Tatis asked Souza to assess his swing. After Souza pointed out he was still “going across the ball,” they drilled to find a solution.Tatis later brought up the 2024 postseason, when he launched four home runs over five games. Back then, he told Souza, he lifted his elbow before dropping it into his hitting slot.